Shaping P2PU

This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.

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Full Description

P2PU's Mission is to provide open and universal access to quality, online life-long learning and education.

And (maybe) also...

  • To find or build a comprehensive curriculum that is as good or better than what a student might get at a traditional university.
  • Run this curriculum using our peer learning model.
  • Enable students to have real world skills and be global citizens.

 

The purpose of this course is to understand how P2PU works: how it is (or isn't) meeting its mission, how conversations about shaping the mission develop, and about how workflows work around the site.  The hope is that this course can play a useful role in the daily operations of P2PU.

We can explore additional questions, like these:

What interpretation of words like "University" and "curriculum" applies at P2PU? How has the mission shifted or expanded over time? How effectively is it being implemented, and how will we know when aspects of it have been achived? 

The new.p2pu.org site is (like the name suggests) new, and there may be some obstacles for us in trying to use it right away.  On the other hand, experiencing these problems first-hand seems like a good way to become acquianted with problems other users are likely to encounter -- and hopefully we can work with the development group to get the most annoying problems fixed soon smiley. 

For the moment, I think it's best left up to participants to decide how to engage with this course (if at all).  For the moment, I think it best to enter an idea-gathering phase.

Accordingly, please feed back ideas about how you'd like this course to be used and how you'd like to use the course.  Thanks!

Task Discussion


  • Anonym   April 13, 2011, 10:16 a.m.

    What made you interested in this topic?

    I have spent up to now 4 years as a student with the Open University in the UK, an online University (mostly) whose (possibly muddled) mission (http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/the-ou-explained/the-ous-mission) has some similarities as well as some differences with that of P2PU:

    1) P2PU   ..open and universal access to quality, online life-long learning and education...

    2) OU      ..open to people, places, methods and ideas...

    The OU is government assisted so provides a much lower cost of education than a traditional university and more recently has placed a sizeable amount of its course materials online in one form or another with free access (like other mainline education institutions).

    I approve in principle the P2PU idea of making use of such provided resources and the willingness of some parties to devote some of their time and energy for education purposes.

    There are some interesting comparisons to be made with p2p sharing (of files).

    What do you hope to achieve by participating?

    I'm interested in a couple of things:-

    1) Identifying the target audience(s).

    2) Identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for a sustainable free model.

    As a secondary objective, I am interested in group dynamics and the interplay between task and people focus.

  • AJC   April 10, 2011, 1:18 p.m.

    What made you interested in this topic?

    I've been involved with P2PU since the early stages, and would like to give special focus to communicating our evolution, engaging new members with clarity and setting the right expectations (especially for such a young, experiemental project like P2PU.)

    What do you hope to achieve by participating?

    I hope to bring historical narrative to the conversations in this working group and help promote the mission of P2PU as natural selection works upon it.

  • Jessica Ledbetter   April 10, 2011, 12:33 p.m.

     

    What made you interested in this topic?

    I believe in the peer-to-peer learning idea. I find that if I have a task to work on then I'm more probably going to do it instead of continuously thinking "I'd really love to learn Python some day." It's nice to learn something new with others because we can help each other out and, hopefully, save each other from repeating the same mistakes.

    What do you hope to achieve by participating?

    Help P2PU, especially School of Webcraft, succeed so that I can :)

  • Joe Corneli   April 10, 2011, 8:01 a.m.

    What made you interested in this topic?

    I'm interested in understanding the general principles that make peer learning and peer production work well.  P2PU's mission seems great, but the devil is in the details, and my previous experiences with courses included both enjoyable successes and some major frustrations.  I'm curious to know how P2PU works, and how it can work better to achieve its mission.

    What do you hope to achieve by participating?

    I think focusing on general design issues for peer learning will support my Ph. D. research on peer learning in mathematics.  I also hope to focus my participation at P2PU on things that work well, or that can work well.  Spending a quarter of the year or thereabouts looking at "core" issues is likely to be the most effective use of my "P2PU time".  I also intend to limit that time so I can focus on the specific mathematics stuff more!  Perhaps the P2PU.org platform will grow to include use-tracking tools that I can use to balance my own workload effectively smiley.  I hope we can have a good conversation about the relevant issues, with a bit more structure than what takes place on the community mailing list.