Currently the only way to participate is in-person. I agree that participating in-person introduce many significant values that are not easily achievable otherwise.
But what if we have access to the recorded class and all the lecture notes? I think by doing so many more people can learn from it (including me).
Is there any possibility to record classes and publish online? Maybe get access to the class notes?
I can recommend you those two links:
Cryptohack challenges really helps to more understand topics shown during Polkadot Blockchain Academy. Also Real World Cryptography book is really good one. Regarding ink! here is documentation: https://use.ink. First and foremost, you need to have (in my opinion) deep, practical knowledge about Rustlang. Those exercises should be doable quite fast for you: GitHub - rust-lang/rustlings: Small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code! if you really want to deliver issues in Substrate/Polkadot repositories.
Not the same as the PBA, but W3F has courses on edX that might be of interest:
Currently only Intro to Blockchain and Intro to Polkadot, but more to come.
A repository of audiovisual learning material from previous classes/events/etc would be very useful for the ecosystem and not that hard to achieve IMO.
FYI we are recording videos and online slides etc… we are just actively choosing not to release them at this time.
I believe the long term goal is to create an online program which is more accessible to everyone, but the class is also deeply exercise based (with mentor / peer review) and technical. I don’t think the academy which would show up online would be the same academy which you would have in person in terms of depth, difficulty, etc…
At this moment, I believe there are a few key strategies we are taking.
Keeping the content close to our chests. As soon as the material gets out, it becomes infinitely easier for other ecosystems to duplicate our work with half the effort. This program is purposefully targeted toward growing the Polkadot ecosystem, and much of this content is really general and could apply across all ecosystems. That means being smart about how we give out this content.
Using the in-person classes and students as fast and immediate feedback on improving the quality and clarity of the program. If we generated an online course today, we are basically putting our brand on the content which we generated for the first time, sight unseen by any students. Just in the first cohort alone, we had so much obvious and subtle feedback that will likely make cohort 2 orders of magnitude better. I suspect we have at least 2 more cycles of improvements before we feel that there are not rough edges. It is unlikely we would want to release a full course online until that time.
Tuning classes and content with the knowledge there are lots of time working together in person, office-hours, open-ended exercises, and of course, finally hiring people on the spot at the end of the academy.
So in summary, the ask here is obvious, and it is certainly part of the roadmap. Remember this program is new, like we did it for the first time just a few months ago. We are working toward having sensible online content tuned for that audience, but it takes a bit of time.
While we develop the course, we plan to do in person academies around the world, multiple times per year. We hope during that time, we will be able to reach many people at much deeper level, and make the best class because of that.
Would be helpful be able to once more time watch lectures from storage part, do you know whether is it possible?
Shawn, thanks for taking the time to respond and for the hard work you put into it (I know how busy you guys are), Great to know someone is on it! Will be waiting in the sidelines.
Low level Videos of how to do thinks in Polkadot.js etc are widely available, now more in depth substrate videos are also available, I will ask around to see if there is a repository available for this, What kinds of lectures where you looking for?
This is about 90% of the same content. A little bit out of date with some things like storage layers by default, but you will learn most everything else.