The act of helping does good to both the person being helped and the person who is helping. Nowhere is this fact more utilised than in the tech industry. The Internet is filled with stories where learners narrate their experience and describe how helping others
- helps you revise concepts and improve yourself
- builds self-confidence by reaffirming your own mastery over the subject
- gives you gratification in knowing that you sped up the learning process for a fellow learner
In fact, these are exactly the feelings that our community moderators articulated when they were asked for the reasons why they like helping in our community!
I, personally, believe that the ability to help others is a skill and a credential. That is why I am super excited about launching the Learning Assistant program with the aim of incentivising all members of this community to cultivate this skill.
Learning Assistants for the Dataquest Community
In this program, we will recognise learners, who consistently help solve the doubts of other learners. We do so by calling them out as Learning Assistants for the Dataquest Community. As a reward, we will also grant them a “Learning Assistant” badge in the Community, free Dataquest Premium membership, official certificate of volunteering and more.
We are dividing the above mentioned rewards into 3 tiers:
Tier 1 : A Learning Assistant badge
Tier 2: 4 weeks of free Dataquest subscription 
Tier 3 : 6 weeks of free Dataquest subscription + Certificate (Dataquest Learning Assistant)
Tier 4: Invitation to join the moderating team of our Dataquest Community 
+ unlimited access to Dataquest Premium subscription as long as you average 30 posts and 6 solutions per month
The Dataquest team will evaluate the community members who are eligible to receive these rewards every month, based on the number of posts that the member has created to solve other learners’ problems.
Evaluation criteria
Here’s how we will evaluate for each tier:
Tier 1
- Minimum number of total replies: 15
- Minimum number of replies marked as solution: 3
Tier 2
- Minimum number of total replies: 30
- Minimum number of replies marked as solution: 6
Tier 3
- Minimum number of total replies: 60
- Minimum number of replies marked as solution: 12
Tier 4
- Minimum number of total replies: 120
- Minimum number of replies marked as solution: 24
A student must satisfy all the criteria for the particular tier in order to qualify for receiving its rewards.
Note: Our goal is to encourage the maximum number of students to help their peers and to that end, we will change or add to the above mentioned criteria as we see fit. So, do keep an eye on this topic for updates.
Let us make everyone around us better through teaching!