BIPU: The Reboot

It's time to revive Build In Public University. Unfortunately, the first run didn't end up working, so I spent a couple of years tweaking, learning, and redesigning it.

And I've finally settled on a design. (All designs subject to change with new information as the university takes off and develops. It will be a collectively designed institution, I don't want to do it all myself. I'm just picking a place to start.)

The goal of Build In Public University is to be the world's first Internet-native, AI-native university. That means a combination of Open Research, Open Data, and Open Source.

Everything at Build In Public University is transparent, because I want to know where it can be better.

The Structure

Learning Structure

Learning is an individual process. Therefore, the design of this university isn't to teach you specific information. Instead, it's designed to create an environment in which learning can happen easily and safely. There will be "degree" programs, that will be shared content/discussion among all students that want to participate. The goal of the content is to share what I've been thinking about and learning, and where I've found success. I've got about 12 months of content planned for that in terms of weekly newsletters/discussion prompts.

Each week there will be a selection of content delivered, partially shared and partially customized based on the data you share when you enroll. Over time, the university will help you understand what your goals are and how the university can help you meet those goals.

The expectation is that you reflect on the content and hopefully share the content, as it helps the creator of the content grow. Then you share your reflections, and discuss it with other students. It's guaranteed social media engagement from people who are thinking about similar things, but run in different circles. As a university, we'll be tracking social media metrics as well, to ensure that we can help students get the level of access and exposure they need.

All of this data will be used to help students create an AI submind, which will help them understand themselves as well as helping students to aggregate data in privacy-safe ways.

A good university has to broadcast the good things they are doing, in order to be heard above the noise.

Fee Structure

Tuition for Build In Public University is a one-time fee, payable as $10K in one payment or $1K/month for a year.

Of that, 50% is for the university, and 50% of it is for the professor whose link was used to enroll.

Work/Study

With skill development, it's important to be able to get feedback on how well you did. That's why work/study is designed into the university from the beginning. Half of your tuition goes into the professor's fund. That fund they can use to easily pay for work to be done by students to support their research/businesses/etc. The additional benefit is that this will allow the university to track work being done and determine what high-value work looks like, helping make the university better for all future students. Once a student, always a student, so the benefit to future students benefits you too.

Student Evaluations

You determine what you want to learn. The university will be responsible for giving you a way to evaluate what you've learned against some kind of standard. There's also going to be an individual evaluation process that begins when you enroll. The plan for the university is to prove out that it is worth more than the value of tuition, so in order to do that we need to determine what the value of each student is at the time they enroll, and then track how long it takes them to improve to that + $10K.

Professors

Professors are those who have done enough work to be vouched for by another professor. To begin with, I'm naming honorary professors whose work has improved my life. They'll be given an enrollment link, and a link to their professor pages, where I'm going to share what I've learned from them and why I feel it's really valuable. The goal is two-fold.

One, I want them to share the university with their audience. That helps me/the university grow. It gives me access to audiences I don't have access to myself. And it helps them grow their level of influence.

And two, I want to show them that I know enough about what they do (which is what they know) so they believe me when I say what I know about the rest. I'm trying to give them a reason to trust me and share this university with their audience.

They don't have to, of course. But I wanted to give them the lowest possible effort option of doing something that could potentially benefit them. With students enrolling via their link, that's essentially their audience voting on seeing more from them in the world, and giving them the resources to make it happen. Even if they don't sign on to begin with, the enrollment links will be publicly available, so students can enroll with professor links that they didn't share.

I want these honorary professors to benefit with no work required at all. It has to be something that works without their input, but gives them access to new resources.

Once I've named the beginning honorary professors, I'll work on determining a relatively straightforward way of naming new professors in a regular way. It's not meant to be a gatekeeping operation, just a minimal bar of quality to hit.

Links

Want to support the university's mission? You can do so here:

Find out if you are a fit for BIPU here: