The IOTA Foundation, a non-profit organization which supports the ongoing development of the Tangle-based and distributed ledger technology (DLT)-powered IOTA platform, has announced the launch of the IOTA Academy.

According to a tweet posted on April 25, 2019 from IOTA’s official Twitter account, the foundation’s “first international IOTA academy program” has been developed via “close cooperation with the IOT1 Academy, a deep tech academy based in Berlin and Shanghai.”

Educational Materials Designed For All Types Of Learners

As explained in the announcement, most of the Academy’s educational materials can be bought online. According to the organization’s blog post, “the IOTA Foundation offers a selection of online trainings as well as blended trainings for coders & developers.”

There are also several additional materials for “non-coders” including “blockchain enthusiasts, futurists, and students, but also corporate project managers, concepters and c-level managers,” IOTA Foundation’s blog post revealed. Moreover, other materials will reportedly be added to the current list of educational content in the coming weeks.

The IOTA Academy also offers students the option to earn an “IOTA Developer Certification,” which is awarded to those who successfully complete a “written and oral assessment” administered by “members of the IOTA Foundation.”

Cryptocurrency-Related Educational Initiatives

As noted by the IOTA Foundation, the Academy is expected to help spread awareness about the IOTA network, which is notably not based on blockchain technology. Instead, the IOTA platform has been developed using the Tangle, which is a structure that has been created using the computer science concept of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs).

Commenting on the educational initiative, Holger Köther, the Director of Partner Management at the IOTA Foundation, remarked:

We believe [that] an investment into IOTA Education, as well as acquiring deep knowledge in [a] short [amount of] time, will be of great benefit for corporates, engineers and developers to actively shape the upcoming internet of things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine ecosystems.

Notably, the IOTA Foundation has now joined several other cryptocurrency-related organizations and companies that have launched their own educational initiatives. For example, Malta-based crypto exchange, Binance has introduced the Binance Academy, which allows students to learn about various crypto-related topics.

American fintech firm, Ripple Labs and the Cardano Foundation have also introduced their own independent educational programs over the last few years.

On April 19, 2019, IOTA announced its partnership with EVRYTHNG, an internet-of-things (IoT) platform that “activates every consumer product to make it intelligent, interactive and trackable.” The partnership between the two organizations involves leveraging some of IOTA’s main technologies by incorporating them into EVRYTHNG’s Blockchain Integration Hub. After the integration, consumer product brands will “have an easy way to rapidly test, scale and deploy IoT applications,” the announcement revealed.