P2PU The Social Wrapper for OER

p2pu cartoon

This page is intended as both a starting point to learn about P2PU and the story behind it, and also a personal take on the role of P2PU in the broader context of open education and open social education. It is my space for reflecting on the challenges we are facing, and making sense of them as we go along. I am writing in my personal capacity here and not everything necessarily represents the consensus of the P2PU community, although I hope that the two mostly overlap. I am also linking to a lot of resources that are not hosted on my blog, so please follow the links if you want the details. I started focusing almost full-time on P2PU in late 2008 and received a Shuttleworth fellowship that allows me to work on open collaborative resources in June 2009.

This page is likely to change often. I am using it to incubate ideas, which will be moved into the blog when they outgrow this space.

History

P2PU is the brainchild of Delia Browne, Neeru Paharia, Stian Haklev, Joel Thierstein and Philipp Schmidt. While we pushed the car to get the engine puttering, it’s now being piloted and maintained by a small crew of extremely talented and committed people.

P2PU Gang

We announced the pilot phase during the Open Ed conference in Vancouver (a recording of the session, which provides more info on the types of courses and has a number of great questions from the audience is here on ustream) and started our first round of courses on 09/09/2009.

After the pilot phase, we spent four days in Berlin to put our heads together and debate what worked and what didn’t and set out our strategy for 2010 (our worldcup year). In line with P2PU values, all notes from the meeting are available online.

The Context

This is a moment of great opportunity for innovation in higher education. A number of factors create the space for initiatives like P2PU to experiment with a real paradigm shift - changing what we expect from education (this is a huge topic of course) and how it can be provided to more people. Demand for higher education especially in developing countries is starting to outstrip supply and as India and China grow up, traditional institutions and modes of teaching and learning cannot scale fast enough. Secondly, in developed countries, the cost of higher education is excluding more and more people. While Economists might argue that the market determines the fair value of a quality degree, this might not lead us to a socially desirable situation as the value of a degree to the individual, might not coincide with the value of an educated person to society. Students end up paying premiums for things that are not related to quality education or that make them better citizens - like joining powerful networks of decision makers. In addition, we should ask hard questions about the quality of education that our current institutions provide. For example, some of the best graduates from some of the world’s best universities have just played a not insubstantial role in almost wrecking the world’s financial system.  And finally, there are calls for education to foster each person’s individual strengths and qualities, and focus on meta-skills expected to be particularly valuable in a knowledge driven society, such as problem solving, leadership, and communication.

Learning from open source

This has been a recurring theme and practice at P2PU. We often check how things work in open source software communities and how we could apply lessons from open source to P2PU. In my first piece on the topic, I  wrote about the role of mentors, and what we can use from mentorship arrangements in open source software. Since then, the idea of mentorship at P2PU is not only part of how the learning works, but has also taken hold as a way to bring more people into the community. At the Berlin workshop, we decided on an orientation process that is designed to help new course organisers,  design and plan their courses. Part of the orientation is a mentorship component, where experienced course organisers are available to answer questions and provide feedback.

Media (and other) attention - the power of public commitment

P2PU is clearly hitting a nerve (riding a wave). The attention from both professional media as well as the blogosphere has been tremendous and helped us pick up speed much faster than we could have hoped for. We are using google alerts to keep track of what people write about us and you can find more than 80 blog posts and articles collected in our diigo bookmarks group. A few good places to start:

Getting a lot of attention early on also made us realise the power of “public commitment”. When Jeff Young wrote the first article about us in The Chronicle of Higher Education, P2PU was little more than an idea shared by a small group of people. We had been talking about “doing something” for a while, but once we had nailed our colors to the mast so publicly there was no turning back. Had we waited until our web-site was ready, we would probably still be planning. Since it worked so well, we have been using the “public commitment” method for other things as well - including the tasks we all set ourselves during the Berlin workshop.

Accreditation

The social learning practices that make up P2PU are only part of the puzzle. The question of accreditation, and especially alternative accreditation is the ultimate hacking education challenge. Here is some of my thinking on the topic, and I just wrote a blog post about our upcoming workshop in 2010, sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation.