Hub name: The Educators’ Hub: Teaching Ethereum Across Audiences
Topic: Blockchain education and literacy (the craft of teaching, across audiences, regions, and languages)
Applicants: Shayan Eskandari and Zuzanna Dziedzic
Summary of Proposal
A hub by and for blockchain educators. We gather teachers who reach very different audiences, from developers to business students to the general public, across languages and regions, to existing approaches to the blockchain education, courses real impact on learners.
Expect open sessions, honest reviews of real courses, and a shared record pointing toward a future conference presentation/paper on blockchain education.
Motivation and Rationale
Blockchain education and building public awareness is happening everywhere at once, but the people doing it rarely compare notes. A university instructor teaching engineers, a business school running a founders’ course, a community organizer onboarding a small town in its own language, and a self-taught educator reaching thousands online all face the same problem from different angles: how do you make this material land for the person in front of you. Most of what works is tacit and scattered. This hub exists to make it visible and shared.
That is also why a hub fits better than a talk or workshop. The value here is comparative and cumulative. One educator’s method only means something next to another’s, and the insights only add up when the room keeps building on them through the day. A hub lets us run short teach-backs with the academia and industry fostering knowledge sharing and building upon experience of all involved co-creating old and co-creating new approches.
A hub focused on the craft of teaching, rather than on a single fixed curriculum, fits this vision directly. It also extends NOVA SBE’s mission, which we put into practice every day through projects such as Blockchain.PT and initiatives supported by the Ripple Impact Fund: democratizing blockchain literacy beyond the usual centers of expertise.
Everything we produce stays open, in keeping with open source. Our own program is free and published openly at blockchainacademy.online, and this hub applies the same principle to teaching itself. We attended past Devcon hubs as participants; the ones that worked had a clear rhythm and a low barrier to contribute, and we are designing around that.
Open Collaboration
This hub is a community effort, not a closed program. We are actively open to collaborating with other educational institutions, community programs, and individual educators who want to take part, co-run sessions, or bring their own teaching experience into the room. The goal is shared: to gather insights into how blockchain education is approached, the challenges people run into, and the practices that actually work, and to keep that record openly available afterward. If you teach this material in any context and want to be part of it, we want you involved. Institutions and educators interested in collaborating can reach us before or during the event.
Implementation
Devcon’s standard hub setup (LED screen with HDMI, seating for around thirty, whiteboards and cork boards, a work table, power, and Ethernet) covers most of what we need. The additions below are things we will source ourselves.
Facilitation kit: sticky notes, markers, and printed prompt cards for the open discussions and teach-back sessions. We run these formats regularly and will bring our own materials.
Live knowledge base: a shared document and repository that we maintain throughout the event, capturing insights, methods, and honest post-mortems from each session. This becomes the artifact that outlives the event and feeds toward a future conference on blockchain education (see Programming).
Optional light capture: with consent, we would like to record the stage session and selected discussions to build that knowledge base. We will bring our own recording setup and will not rely on Devcon production for it.
Pictures of Selected Past Events
Programming
Our structured program runs as a single full day (09:00 to 18:00) inside the hub, moving through the full range of teaching contexts in one arc rather than spreading thin. Sessions are deliberately short and interactive, with the longer blocks given to open discussion and hands-on time rather than presentations. The space itself stays open and staffed for drop-in discussion, collaboration, and continued capture of insights (see Open Collaboration).
Single-day agenda (09:00 to 18:00)
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09:00 to 09:45, Educator check-in. Coffee and a round of who is in the room and what they teach, across every audience type.
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09:45 to 11:00, Teaching technical audiences. A teach-back and short workshop on reaching engineers and security-minded learners. Draws on graduate level teaching, the online developer courses, and smart contract security education.
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11:00 to 12:15, Teaching non-technical audiences. A teach-back and discussion on reaching business students, founders, and professionals. Draws on NOVA SBE and the Blockchain Academy’s open-enrollment cohorts.
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12:15 to 13:15, Open lunch and informal exchange.
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13:15 to 14:30, Multicultural environment teaching approaches across regions and languages. Reaching smaller cities, different languages, and communities the field usually skips, including teaching under real-world constraints. Draws on the Farsi-language work and the Academy’s move into the Portuguese interior (Covilha, Beira Interior). Directly relevant to India’s regional and linguistic diversity.
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14:30 to 15:30, Onboarding block. Newcomers are welcomed in and educators practice their approaches on real first-time learners.
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15:30 to 16:30, Teaching the teachers. Training new and future educators, with a fishbowl on what works and what fails across all of the day’s contexts.
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16:30 to 17:15, Synthesis. We pull the day’s insights into a shared, open record aimed at a future conference on blockchain education.
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17:15 to 18:00, Networking and next steps for collaborators.
Stage session: We would run an interactive “teach the same concept, three ways” session. Educators from different contexts each teach one shared concept to the Devcon audience in a few minutes, and the audience then discusses what landed and why. It puts the hub’s whole thesis on stage in a format that is participatory rather than a presentation.
Potential speakers and educators
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Confirmed: Shayan Eskandari and Zuzanna Dziedzic.
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Target and invited: educators from India’s Ethereum community and student groups (see Audience), colleagues from the IEEE Blockchain Confluence network (India and Lisbon, 2025), Blockchain Academy and BLOCKCHAIN.PT collaborators, and community educators reaching non-English audiences.
We want a deliberately diverse set of educators in the room: experienced instructors, people who just started teaching, and people who are about to. That mix is the point of the hub.
Audience
Who this is for. Blockchain educators and aspiring educators of every kind: university instructors, bootcamp and academy leaders, community organizers, DevRel and developer advocates, content creators, and translators of technical material. Alongside them, we want curious newcomers in the room during the daily onboarding blocks, because they are who educators learn to teach.
How we engage India’s Ethereum community. We are based in Lisbon, so connecting with the local community is a priority we are planning for directly rather than assuming. Our starting points:
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Former students. A number of people who took the smart contract auditing and development courses are now active in India’s ecosystem. We will reach out ahead of the event and invite them to co-run sessions.
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Local educators first. We will reserve featured teach-back slots specifically for Indian educators and student communities, so the hub reflects local teaching practice and is not just international voices talking about India.
Multilingual capability. Between the two of us we can facilitate and produce material in English, Portuguese, Farsi, French, and Polish. The regions and languages block lean into exactly this, and we will actively bring in educators working in Hindi and other Indian languages.
Team
- Shayan Eskandari. Independent security researcher and educator, based in Lisbon. PhD in information systems security, with a master’s on Bitcoin usability and human-centered security. Instructor at the Blockchain Academy (NOVA SBE and Universidade da Beira Interior, part of BLOCKCHAIN.PT), teaching Blockchain Fundamentals, Blockchain Platforms, and Business Applications of Smart Contracts. Also teaches at NOVA SBE in the fall to a business school audience. Ran free Farsi-language blockchain and smart contract courses through CoinIran Academy across two editions, reaching a wide range of ages and backgrounds, and supervised the instructor team. Teaching assistant for Concordia University’s graduate blockchain course (INSE 6615) and guest lecturer at the University of Ottawa. Professional background includes 50 or more smart contract audits and a lead auditor role at ConsenSys Diligence, which anchors the technical and security education side.
- Zuzanna Dziedzic, is a Project and Programme Manager with over 10 years of experience leading international initiatives in development, innovation, and education, from project design through implementation and delivery. Her expertise spans complex, multi-stakeholder projects funded under frameworks such as EuropeAid framework contracts, UNDP, Horizon 2020, Innovate UK, EUROSTARS, and Erasmus+. Zuzanna holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and a Postgraduate Diploma in Humanitarian Action. She is a PMP®-certified professional, a certified trainer specializing in gender equality, and holds a Certificate in Monitoring and Evaluation (Results-Based Management) from the International Training Centre of the ILO (ITCILO). Her work is grounded in strong expertise in quality assurance, monitoring and evaluation, and results-based management. She serves as Programme Coordinator of the Blockchain.pt (PRR) initiative at NOVA School of Business and Economics, implemented under Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), and leads a further initiative under the Ripple Impact Fund grant, also at NOVA SBE — within which she led the design of the Blockchain Academy programme and developed its training materials, with a specific focus on project management inputs for blockchain initiatives. As a trainer and educator, she is a certified specialist in gender equality and holds a Certificate of Pedagogical Competences (IEFP), having delivered training internationally on topics including project management, transversal skills frameworks for VET teachers, work in multicultural contexts, and participatory and gamification-based learning methods across Europe. She is fluent in Polish, English, and Portuguese, with French at an intermediate level.
Why the space stays neutral and marketing-free. Our entire track record is open and non-commercial. The Blockchain Academy is free, and all of its content is published openly in English and Portuguese. We teach concepts and the craft of teaching them, not products, and we do not promote tokens or projects. That is not a constraint we are accepting for this hub, it is how we already work. Everything produced in the hub will be shared openly on the same basis.
Thank you.