Course
The Web3 course provides an accessible introduction to blockchain, digital assets, and technologies shaping the digital economy. Participants learn core concepts—including blockchains, wallets, tokens, and smart contracts—without needing prior experience in technology, finance, or investing.
We designed Web3 to support self-directed learning, critical thinking, and digital safety. Through practical lessons, examples, and offline exercises, participants learn how these systems work, evaluate claims and tradeoffs, and recognize scams, security threats, and irreversible mistakes. The course does not require learners to purchase digital assets, open accounts, or use online financial products.
For correctional staff, Web3 offers a structured resource for building digital literacy and introducing emerging technologies in a responsible, balanced way. The course can support education, workforce development, and reentry preparation while helping participants explore ethical applications, transferable skills, and potential career pathways in the digital economy.
Learn how the Web3 course is structured, designed for access, and used to build practical knowledge and responsible judgment.
Lessons progress from the evolution of the internet and blockchain fundamentals to digital assets, smart contracts, safety, practical applications, and career pathways.
The course uses plain language, practical examples, and offline exercises. Participants do not need prior technical experience, online accounts, downloaded applications, or digital assets.
Participants examine scams, privacy, custody, volatility, fees, irreversible errors, and misleading claims while learning practices that support careful, lawful, and ethical decisions.
Participants may work independently with printed lessons. Staff may also use the materials for guided discussions, digital-literacy education, workforce development, or reentry preparation.
Self-Paced Learning
The Web3 course begins with a preface and 20 self-paced modules that build from internet and blockchain fundamentals to digital safety, practical applications, and career pathways. Participants may follow the recommended sequence and revisit lessons as needed. Each module includes plain-language instruction, key terms, practical examples, reflection questions, and downloadable materials designed for print or offline learning.
This preface introduces Michael Santos's invitation to learn deliberately, document progress, and become your own Prison Professor. Participants learn how to use the course, complete Profile journal entries, and build a record of preparation while approaching Web3 with curiosity, caution, and responsible judgment.
Topics: Course Orientation • Self-Directed Learning • Building a Profile
This lesson introduces the course's purpose, structure, and educational boundaries. Participants create a personal learning commitment and consider how reading, reflection, and dated journal entries can demonstrate disciplined preparation.
Topics: Preparation • Critical Thinking • Profile Journal
This lesson explains how the internet developed from a place where people primarily read information into a system built around participation, content creation, commerce, and large online platforms. Participants compare the benefits and tradeoffs of that change.
Topics: Early Internet • Web2 • Online Platforms
This lesson introduces Web3 as a collection of technologies and ideas involving blockchain networks, digital assets, programmable agreements, and new approaches to digital control and ownership. Participants learn to distinguish established capabilities from opinions, forecasts, and promotional claims.
Topics: Web3 • Digital Ownership • Evaluating Claims
This lesson compares centralized and decentralized ways of organizing information, authority, and responsibility. Participants examine convenience, efficiency, resilience, accountability, and control without assuming that either approach is always superior.
Topics: Centralization • Decentralization • Tradeoffs
This review reinforces the differences among the early internet, Web2, and Web3. Participants complete knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a practical scenario comparing centralized and decentralized ways to manage a shared digital record.
Topics: Knowledge Review • Vocabulary • Practical Scenario
This lesson introduces blockchain as a type of shared digital ledger. Participants learn how records are grouped, linked, maintained, and verified—and why a blockchain may be useful in some situations but unnecessary in others.
Topics: Blockchain • Digital Ledger • Shared Records
This lesson explains how transaction information becomes part of a linked blockchain record. Participants learn how cryptographic hashes help reveal changes and why “tamper-evident” is more accurate than claiming that every blockchain record is impossible to alter.
Topics: Blocks • Transactions • Hashes
This lesson explains how computers on a blockchain network communicate, check information, and follow shared rules. Participants compare proof of work and proof of stake while considering security, energy, speed, participation, and concentration tradeoffs.
Topics: Nodes • Consensus • Network Security
This lesson compares how blockchain networks make different design choices. Participants learn the roles of Layer 1 networks, Layer 2 scaling systems, and applications while recognizing that layer labels can vary and do not prove a system's quality.
Topics: Blockchain Networks • Layer 1 and Layer 2 • Scalability
This review reinforces how blockchains record transactions, link information, coordinate participants, and use different network layers. Participants apply the concepts through knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a recordkeeping or scaling scenario.
Topics: Blockchain Review • Network Layers • Applied Judgment
This lesson distinguishes a blockchain's native coin from tokens created through a blockchain platform. Participants examine different functions digital assets may perform while considering volatility, liquidity, fraud, regulatory uncertainty, and the limits of common labels.
Topics: Cryptocurrency • Coins • Tokens
This lesson explains how stablecoins attempt to maintain a stable value and why the word “stable” does not mean risk-free. Participants examine reserves, collateral, issuers, redemption, liquidity, technology, and the possibility that a stablecoin may lose its intended value.
Topics: Stablecoins • Reserves • Risk Evaluation
This lesson explains how tokens may represent access, records, rights, credentials, or unique items. Participants distinguish the blockchain record from the item it references and evaluate questions involving authenticity, ownership, copyright, storage, fraud, and legal rights.
Topics: Tokenization • NFTs • Digital Records
This review reinforces the differences among coins, tokens, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and non-fungible tokens. Participants complete knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a scenario requiring them to evaluate the claims attached to a hypothetical digital asset.
Topics: Digital Assets • Vocabulary Review • Claim Evaluation
This lesson explains what a blockchain wallet does and corrects the misconception that a wallet physically stores digital assets. Participants distinguish public addresses from private credentials and learn why private keys, seed phrases, passwords, and authentication codes must never be shared.
Topics: Wallets • Private Keys • Credential Safety
This lesson compares third-party custody with self-custody. Participants examine control, convenience, recovery, access, counterparty risk, and personal responsibility without treating either approach as the correct choice for every person or circumstance.
Topics: Custody • Self-Custody • Responsibility
This lesson follows a blockchain transaction from preparation and authorization through network processing, confirmation, and final recordkeeping. Participants identify where address, network, fee, timing, and counterparty errors may occur and why verification matters before authorization.
Topics: Transactions • Digital Signatures • Verification
This lesson helps participants recognize phishing, impersonation, investment, giveaway, romance, support, and recovery scams. Participants practice identifying warning signs, protecting sensitive information, and using a stop, verify, and seek-help process before taking action.
Topics: Scam Awareness • Privacy • Digital Safety
This review reinforces safe practices involving wallets, credentials, custody, and transactions. Participants complete knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a scenario requiring them to identify security failures before a hypothetical transaction occurs.
Topics: Security Review • Custody • Scam Prevention
This lesson explains how code can perform defined actions on a blockchain and how people interact with that code through decentralized applications. Participants examine possible benefits alongside coding, data, governance, usability, security, and legal risks.
Topics: Smart Contracts • Decentralized Applications • Automation
This lesson introduces blockchain-based exchanges, lending, borrowing, collateral, and liquidity pools without encouraging participation. Participants examine how possible returns connect with smart-contract, liquidation, liquidity, volatility, oracle, governance, fraud, and regulatory risks.
Topics: Decentralized Finance • Liquidity • Financial Risk
This lesson explains how blockchain communities may organize proposals, voting, shared resources, and decision-making. Participants examine how voting power, delegation, participation, concentration, security, law, and accountability can affect whether governance is meaningfully decentralized.
Topics: DAOs • Governance • Voting Power
This review reinforces smart contracts, decentralized applications, decentralized finance, and blockchain governance. Participants complete knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a scenario involving an application with both financial and governance risks.
Topics: Smart Contracts • DeFi • Governance Review
This lesson evaluates proposed blockchain uses in recordkeeping, credentials, supply chains, payments, identity, communities, and creative work. Participants compare blockchain with simpler alternatives and identify transferable skills that can support continued learning and career preparation.
Topics: Web3 Applications • Transferable Skills • Career Exploration
This lesson brings together the course's central concepts, risks, and unresolved questions. Participants create a realistic continuing-learning plan and complete a final Profile capstone explaining what they learned and how they intend to prepare responsibly for the future.
Topics: Responsible Participation • Learning Plan • Profile Capstone
This final review reinforces the applications, skills, ethical questions, and planning concepts introduced in Section 6 while revisiting major ideas from the entire course. Participants complete knowledge questions, vocabulary matching, and a practical scenario that prepares them for the final Profile capstone.
Topics: Cumulative Review • Ethical Judgment • Future Preparation
Begin with the preface, then work through the lessons in their recommended order. Each lesson builds vocabulary and understanding that later lessons will use. Participants may take additional time or revisit earlier material whenever necessary.
Read the PDF lesson, complete the offline exercise and knowledge check, and then write the Profile journal entry in your own words. Complete the review at the end of each section before continuing.
Every lesson can be completed with printed materials and separate writing paper. No lesson requires an internet connection, an online account, a wallet, a digital asset, or a financial transaction.
Keep completed work together and include the lesson number, title, and completion date. Never include a password, private key, seed phrase, authentication code, account number, or other sensitive credential in a course response.
Downloadable Materials
Download the complete Understanding Web3 workbook for self-directed study or facilitated learning. The workbook includes the preface, all 20 lessons, offline exercises, knowledge checks, six section reviews, Profile journal assignments, the final capstone, and the answer-key appendix. It is designed for printing and use with or without internet access.
Self-Directed Learning
Understanding Web3 is designed for independent study. Participants do not need an instructor, previous technical knowledge, internet access, an online account, a wallet, or a digital asset. Begin with the preface and work through the lessons in order, allowing enough time to understand and apply each concept.
Read the PDF lesson from start to finish.
Review the key terms and practice explaining them in your own words.
Complete the offline exercise and knowledge check without using real accounts, assets, or credentials.
Write and date the Profile journal entry. Keep a copy of your work whenever circumstances permit.
Complete each section review before continuing. After Lesson 20, complete the final Profile capstone.
There is no required completion schedule. Choose a routine you can sustain, revisit difficult material, and preserve your completed work. A series of dated responses can demonstrate growth, critical thinking, and consistent self-directed preparation.
No facilitator is required. When permitted, staff members or family supporters may help by providing printed materials, writing supplies, or assistance submitting completed entries to a Prison Professors Profile. Participants should complete the learning and writing in their own words.
This course provides education, not individualized financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. No activity requires a purchase, wallet, account, or transaction. Never include a password, private key, seed phrase, authentication code, account number, or other sensitive information in course work. Always follow applicable laws and facility rules.
We welcome questions and feedback about the Understanding Web3 course. Whether you are completing the course, sharing it with someone in custody, or making it available in a correctional, reentry, or educational setting, we would like to hear what works and what we can improve.
Send Us a Message
Tell us about your question or experience with the Understanding Web3 course. We will respond as soon as possible.
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