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P2PU is going strong. We're getting ready to launch our third cycle of courses, but before we do that we need you to propose them! Join in on the fun, all the cool kids are doing it.

From the P2PU Blog:

The Peer 2 Peer University is gearing up to launch its third cycle of courses this coming September, and we’re looking for new faces to join the community. Do you have an idea for a six week course? Whether it’s Physics 101 or Poker and Strategic Thinking, all ideas are welcome. You can propose a course at http://wiki.p2pu.org/Create-a-Course (deadline is August 6, 2010).

If you’ve never designed or run a course before, that’s okay, too. P2PU is running a Course Organizers Orientation for newbies to introduce organizers to the practice of online facilitation and provide support while they build a new course. The orientation will be three weeks long and will enable future course organizers to:

• Experience open social learning first-hand
• Distinguish peer-2-peer learning from formal online teaching
• Navigate the different features of the P2PU site
• Design a course on a topic of their choice on the P2PU site
• Learn how to use different synchronous/asynchronous platforms effectively
• Review and provide feedback for others; revise and refine syllabi for their course

Weekly video conferences will be held to discuss important aspects of community building, course design, finding and creating course content, open educational resources (OER), and troubleshooting. Conferences will be recorded and posted for those unable to attend. The orientation leader will also post office hours to provide additional support.

Building on the feedback from participants and organizers in the last two cycles of courses, the P2PU community realised that many potential course organizers had reservations about some of the technological and pedagogical aspects of running courses online. This orientation aims to address these concerns, as well as help organizers become an active part of the P2PU community.

The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.

More information, including how and where to sign up, can be found on the P2PU wiki: http://wiki.p2pu.org/orientation

You can submit course proposals until August 6, 2010.

Photo CC-BY-SA gi

As I mentioned in my previous post, my course, Mashing Up the Open Web, was a huge success. Since I started participating in P2PU, I've wanted to organize a course. I haven't yet taken part in a course that someone else has organized, although that is on my todo list. I really would have liked to join in on Kitchen Science, but alas my schedule did not permit it.

Background

Since I'm a web developer by trade, I naturally swayed toward the subject area when I was coming up with course ideas. I knew I wanted to organize a course at P2PU, but I wasn't really sure what it would be about. After a few days of thinking I came up with a few different ideas. By chance, while I was toying around with the idea of creating a course on building web mashups, I got wind of the Mozilla Drumbeat project. I don't remember how it all came together exactly, but there was already some steam behind a collaboration between Mozilla and P2PU. The Drumbeat connection definitely made openness even more important. One thing led to another and soon enough I had settled on organizing Mashing Up the Open Web.

When I started, I didn't really know what the course was going to be about so I got on the wiki and started hacking away at a syllabus. The course was designed pretty much top down without anyone helping out or vetting me. If I could do it again, I'd have a few people review the syllabus and help me improve it before running the course. By convention, P2PU courses last six weeks. Mashing Up the Open Web was no exception. I decided to stick with a six week course because it gave us ample time to cover the materials without being over taxing on me or the other participants. Also worth noting, I wrote the entire syllabus while riding a bus back and forth to work.

What did it look like?

The course was project based, and split into two parts alternating between theory and practical skills each week. For the theory segment we covered things like what it means to be open, why openness is important in web development, and how to be open. For the practical skills component we covered some basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and a number of APIs. Although I didn't state it so clearly at the beginning of the course, we basically focused our efforts on answering a question. Each participant needed to come up with an idea for a mashup that would answer a question of importance.

Dennis Riedel was wondering how search results differ from language to language so he built i18n-picture-search on top of the Flickr and Google Translate APIs. See it in action.

Between each class session participants had three assignments. The first and ongoing assignment was to work on the project, be it drawing wireframes, searching for applicable APIs, or actual coding, the project was always the most important aspect of the course. The second assignment between each meeting was a passive assignment to prepare for the next discussion. Participants read papers like The Cathedral and the Bazaar and watched videos on the semantic web by Tim Berners-Lee. The third and final assignment between each class was an active assignment. Participants were to write short essays reflecting on the previous discussion, imagining a closed web, or even contributing to open source projects in the form on patches, bug reports, or support.

Notes from Mashing Up the Open Web Week 3

Who Participated?

The course received 32 sign ups. I admitted 27 of the 32 applicants based upon application completeness. I only rejected applicants that didn't answer all of the questions on the very short application form. Immediately after closing signups I set out to coordinate a weekly time slot for us to have synchronous meetings. The best we could do was 11AM & 1PM Eastern time which would allow for around 20 of the accepted applicants to make the course. For the first week I held two sections, but consolidated to one section at 11AM Eastern for the remaining five weeks.

The participants were extremely varied in skill level, from complete novice to expert. I wasn't incredibly surprised by the wide array of skill levels because I didn't put any technical barrier to entry in place. Over the six weeks a core group of around ten participants emerged. If one was unable to attend, I would receive an email in advance announcing the absence. All of the members of the core group were on a first name basis by the end of the second week.

Participation in Mashing Up the Open Web was truly global. In the initial pool of 27 accepted participants there were almost as many countries represented. Among the core group we had participants from Japan, Hong Kong, India, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the USA.

In the Classroom.

We started the course by using a web based video conferencing tool, Tokbox. Each week at 11AM Eastern, the group would gather in a video conference room to do three things. First each participant would give a project update, followed by a review of the active assignment, and finally a group discussion around the passive assignment. During class, I encouraged participants to ask questions and lead the discussion in whatever direction they wanted it to go. My goal was to facilitate the discussion, not control it. I generally tried to defer answering questions to other participants, unless I was the only one able to answer.

Two sections of Mashing Up the Open Web at P2PU in Tokbox

In addition to the weekly hour of class time, I held two office hours. One at 10AM Eastern (before class) and another at 12PM Eastern (after class). I had a much higher participation rate in the office hours after class than before class, but generally always had at least one participant taking advantage of the time. Office hours were especially useful for working with the less experienced participants.

Why Bother?

This course was an experiment. I wanted to prove a few things. There is a demand for this type of course. Participants will lead themselves to what they want to learn. Organizing a course is intellectually stimulating for the organizer. All three are absolutely true.

What Next?

We're working on a whole series of courses like Mashing Up the Open Web. The goal is to create an entire academy within P2PU where anyone can come and learn all the requisite skills of an open web developer for free. We're also working on a way to provide recognition of accomplishments and certification for the participants who want it. We're not quite sure what that's going to look like yet, but we're working with Mozilla and a panel of experts to give it some real weight.

Sign Me Up!

If you're interested in getting involved with planning and organizing courses you should join the mailing list and introduce yourself. If you're not quite ready to organize a course, but want to be notified when we release our next round, please fill out this very short form. I promise to keep your data safe. You can also fill out the form if you have a course idea that you'd like to share with us.

CC-BY-SA Alison Jean Cole

A few years ago, I had an idea: I wanted to travel around the world and meet interesting people who I could learn from in exchange for sharing my skills. I remember having the idea very vividly. I was on an airplane, as I often was back in those days, and I was scribbling as fast as I could in my notebook. There was going to be an online component to a mostly offline experience. People would be able to lend resources such as classrooms, domain knowledge, books, supplies, and equipment. I was convinced something like this should already exist, so I did what you'd expect, I scoured the net high and low. As I searched I came across a number of different communities and resources but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for.

Sure there was CouchSurfing, but that was mainly focused on the travel community with a very minor attempt at a skill sharing system. I also found things like MIT's Open Course Ware, but there was something lacking, the community, the people. In my searching I came across a new term, Open Education. I had long known of FLOSS, so the concept of open education was pretty natural to me. Further down the road I heard about the annual Open Education Conference, so in 2008, I attended. My trip was kindly funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation based on my intent to share the idea. As it turned out, I wasn't alone in my thinking and I met Philipp, Stian, and Joel.

At this point, tons of ideas were brewing for all of us. There were a million directions that we could go. Different people had different ideas and we took a slow growth route in order to solidify what it was we were trying to accomplish.

Fast forward two years and you've got Peer 2 Peer University, a thriving community of individuals passionate about learning. Our core values are clear. We're an open community for peer learning. We're here to facilitate learning groups and give participants the recognition they deserve. P2PU encourages experimentation, and I love experiments.

As of now we've run more than twenty courses in two cycles. In the most recent cycle, I organized my first course, Mashing Up the Open Web. Mashing up The Open Web is the first course in a series of Open Web courses that we're working on in conjunction with Mozilla as part of the Drumbeat initiative. I'll save the details for a later post, but I will say that the course was an amazing success and that I absolutely enjoyed every minute of it. I've always had the idea of becoming a teacher in the back of my mind, P2PU has helped me prove that idea is a good one.

Are you interested in learning more about the Open Web? Then sign up for my course, Mashing Up the Open Web at P2PU. Sign-ups close on 3 March officially, but if you're really keen on taking the course, contact me.

Course Description

An introduction to open web standards. HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and more?) through project based learning. This course is not for complete novices, some web experience is required. Participants will work on a self defined project that leverages open datasets and web services to create a mashup that is useful to their target audience. The participants will engage in weekly real time meetings (irc, voice, or other) as well as ongoing asynchronous communication. The role of the organizer will be to guide participants in selecting a feasible project and assisting the 'just in time' learning experience associated with technology discovery.

The course will include discussions on the Open Web and help participants understand the importance of keeping the web open. Aside from practical web skills like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript participants will be introduced to a number of free and open data visualization tools. Participants will learn how to find open data and use those resources in creating a web mashup.

What are you waiting for? Sign-up Now!

On August 26, 2009 at midnight EST we closed applications to the first cycle at the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) with a total of 227 applicants across 7 courses. The six week pilot phase will begin on September 9, 2009 (09/09/09). Each of the 7 courses has a maximum enrollment of 8 - 15 students. All applicants will be notified of their status within a week.

P2PU Course Application Distribution

Number of Applicants to Each P2PU Course

• 54 - Copyright for Educators
• 48 - Behavioral Economics and Decision Making
• 34 - Land Restoration and Afforestation
• 30 - Open Creative Nonfiction Writing
• 25 - Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature
• 20 - Poker and Strategic Thinking
• 16 - Neuroethics and International Biolaw

Summary

These are exciting times, all of our initial courses have more applicants than we can possibly accept. At the end of the first cycle, we're going to meet for a retrospective and iterate on our methodology. During the second cycle I'll be leading a course on web development. Hope to see you there.