01 / Locked
It lives on someone else’s server
A certificate belongs to the platform that issued it. When the platform pivots, prices up or shuts down, your proof goes with it.
Alpha · waiting list open
An honest attempt at making education — and its recognition — free, forever.
Learning became free. Recognition did not. Alexandria is a free, open-source learning app for every device — and a credential you own outright, that anyone can verify, anywhere, without us.
Alpha
Connected
Good evening, Priya
3 peers nearby are sharing courses you follow
Your goal
58%Become an Engineering Manager4 of 7 skills at Apply · 2 mentoring attestations to go
Skill map
Bloom levels · filled = Apply or above
Continue learning
Pipe welding fundamentals
7/12 · offline
Reading weld symbols
3/8 · offline
Guitar: fretboard theory
1/10 · plugin
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NDT basics: visual inspection
Free · 9 lessons
Metallurgy for welders
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The real shell — press / for search, open Skills & Credentials and verify one
62%
of American adults hold no bachelor’s degree
<1 in 700
new hires actually benefited when employers dropped degree requirements
+25%
average salary increase for workers hired without a degree, where it did take hold
+10 pts
higher retention than colleagues who held degrees
Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work with the Burning Glass Institute, February 2024 — 11,300 large US firms, 2014–2023. US Census Bureau, educational attainment, 2022.
Read the evidence in full ›The problem
The knowledge is identical. The recognition is not — and it is the recognition that changes the life.
A teenager in a Mumbai slum can take the same course as one at MIT — the same lectures, the same problems, the same hours. Only one of them ends up with a credential anyone will accept. Employers have tried to fix this from their side and largely failed, because nothing replaced the degree as a signal they could trust.
02 / Not portable
It rarely crosses a border
Recognition stops at the edge of the institution that granted it, and at the edge of the country that recognises that institution.
03 / Unequal
The price of proof is the barrier
Free courses reach everyone and leave no proof behind. Paid certificates carry weight and cost money the learner does not have.
Verify it yourself
Don't trust us. Check the credential.
Every credential is a W3C Verifiable Credential, Ed25519-signed under the holder's own DID and hash-anchored on-chain. Confirm it with our tooling, someone else's, or none at all.
Offline
Verification needs no network
0
Calls to Alexandria required
MIT
Core licence, forever
// issued on device, no server involved { "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/v2"], "type": ["VerifiableCredential", "SkillCredential"], "issuer": "did:key:z6MkhaXgBZD…QYtP", "credentialSubject": { "skill": "welding.pipe.6g", "level": "apply", "evidence": "blake3:9f2c…e17a" }, "proof": { "type": "Ed25519Signature2020", "anchor": "cardano:tx/8a41…c92f" } }
One app, the whole system
Everything you expect from an education app, and then a whole lot more.
No subscriptions, no data collection — a native app that turns your device into a full participant in a global learning network.
Learn without limits
Courses, video tutorials and Opinions — takes from practitioners who hold the very skill they teach. Free, open-source, offline-first.
- Courses with real, hands-on assessments
- Works offline — no internet required
- Nine languages, from English and Chinese to Spanish, Hindi and Bengali
Opinions
Real learning is not only settled facts — it is weighing competing views and forming your own.
- Credentialed takes, not anonymous hot takes
- See where experts genuinely disagree
Teach and assess anything
Video, text and multiple choice are not enough — different skills need different ways to teach and test. Plugins let Alexandria assess welding, music, engineering, surgery, and beyond.
Classrooms
Teachers stay close to the students they invite, inside a safe, contained space — organised into channels.
#announcements#questions#assignments#showcase
invite-only · you decide who's in
Learn live, together
Face-to-face tutoring is built in — video, audio and screen-share connect learners and mentors directly, device to device.
- Live one-on-one video tutoring
- Peer to peer — no call runs through a company
A shared map of knowledge
Every lesson and credential ties to a public map of skills with clear prerequisites, so a credential means the same thing everywhere — and it is kept accurate by the community, not one company.
Earned (5)Available (4)Locked (7)
5 / 16 skills · dot size shows skill level
Your credentials, your data, your device
One identity, created on your device. It signs every credential you earn and encrypts everything you keep — syncing straight between your own devices, with relays that cannot read a thing.
✦Root pass, 6G pipedid:key:z6Mkha…QYtP · ed25519Genuine
This MacYour phone
Encrypted end to end. Six kinds of credential — yours forever, even if Alexandria disappears.
Assessments you can trust
Sentinel, an optional integrity layer, keeps credentials honest — and runs entirely on your device.
Typing0.96
Mouse0.91
Smart models0.88
0.94Integrity score · High
Quiet snapshots every 15–45s. Raw camera, typing and mouse data never leave this device.
Reputation without the star rating
Instructors are scored on their impact on learners — a per-skill distribution with confidence bounds, not one global number.
welding.pipe.6g
welding.tig
inspection.ndt
Bars show confidence bounds — wider means less evidence. No global score anywhere.
Community governed
Only people who have proven expertise in a subject get a vote on how it is taught — not money, not seniority.
- A vote is earned by what you can do, per subject
- Draft → committee → public vote
It is a long list. We keep meaning to trim it and have not managed yet.
How it works
From download to credentials you own, in four steps.
Nothing in this sequence registers you with anyone — the first step creates your account on the device itself.
- 01
Download & launch
Install on any device. Your account is created on the device itself — no email, no password to lose, and nothing registered with a company.
- 02
Learn & earn credentials
Take free courses, tutorials and assessments. Finish an assessment and you earn a credential for it — no waiting, no paperwork.
- 03
Own & prove
Each credential is signed under your own identity and made tamper-proof, so anyone can check it is genuine — anywhere, even without Alexandria.
- 04
Share & take part
Share credentials with employers, choosing exactly what to reveal. What you have proven gives you a say in how your community is run.
Runs everywhere
One codebase. Every platform. Native performance.
macOS
Windows
Linux
iOS
Android
Runs on macOS 10.15+, Windows 10+, Linux, iOS 16.4+, and Android 9+. For live video tutoring on Android we recommend a device with 6 GB+ RAM.
Beyond learners
Proof that travels to the people who need it.
The same credential a learner earns is the one a recruiter checks and an institution issues.
For recruiters
Hire verified talent, not resumes.
Discover candidates through credentials you can verify yourself and a transparent record of how they learned.
Skill-based discoveryFull record behind each credentialCandidate consent required
Explore for employers ›For institutions
Your LMS, their credentials.
An open-source LMS where students own credentials they can prove anywhere, and institutions keep full control.
Free self-hosted tierSkill-mapped curriculumZero vendor lock-in
Explore for institutions ›Free forever
Free cannot be a promise. It has to be a structure.
Right now, it is still a promise — and we should say that plainly, because every platform that started free and ended paywalled was telling the truth at the time too. Here is what actually holds today, and what we are putting in place so it stops depending on us.
A fork always exists
The core is MIT-licensed. If we ever betrayed this, the work could be taken and run by anyone, without our permission and without our cooperation. That is a floor, not a ceiling — but it is a real one, and you can check it.
Read the licenceA non-profit veto over free access
The intended structure: a permanent, dilution-proof veto over free learner access, held by IFFTU as a Section 8 non-profit — so that nobody, including us and including a future investor, can charge a learner for their own proof.
The instrument does not exist yet. When it is executed we will publish the clause here, and you can hold us to the distance between this paragraph and that one.
Why not simply promise?
Because a promise is exactly what every paywalled platform once made. A guarantee that depends on the continued good intentions of the people who benefit from breaking it is not a guarantee. The point of the structure is to remove our own ability to change our minds.
Who pays
Free for learners. Paid for organisations.
The split is deliberate, and it is the whole business model. Learning, owning a credential and proving it are free permanently. Organisations pay for running this at scale — never for a learner's right to their own proof.
Always free
- Taking courses and assessments
- Earning and holding credentials
- Proving one to anybody, forever
- Running the app, self-hosting the core
What organisations pay for
- Managed hosting and operations
- SSO, SIS and ATS integrations
- Team workflows and shared review
- Support, migration and deployment
Where we actually are
Built, shipped, and unproven.
Two lists, because a page that only tells you what works has told you what it wants to be true.
Works today
- Learning, assessment and credentials, in the alpha, on five platforms
- Credentials that verify with no account and no network — including on this site
- Nine languages on three continents — English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali
- An MIT-licensed core, public and forkable today
Does not yet
- No institution has deployed this
- Nobody has been hired through a credential issued by it
- No independent validity study has been completed
- No content moderation, and the interface needs real design work
Two claims underpin the whole project and neither has evidence behind it: that employers will pay for verified skill, and that a credential like this earns real recognition. Both are written down, with what would change our minds.
Check for yourself
Nothing here asks to be taken on faith.
Get in the queue.
Individuals join the waiting list and we write when it is their turn. Organisations run a pilot: one programme or one role family, with success measures agreed before anyone starts.
Prefer to read the code first? It's all on GitHub.