Half a year ago we teamed up with Anya Kamenetz to bring a social wrapper to her book, The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential. We created a study group on P2PU and amazing things happened. We realized we wanted this kind of support to be available to learners anytime, anywhere. We also wanted to help people through the first big step into the world of DIY education – making a personal learning plan.

We took our experience with the study group and transformed it into a project based challenge on P2PU. Independent learners can sign up at anytime, work through the steps at their own pace and receive support along the way. People feeling more experienced in their learning journeys are encouraged to join as a mentor!

Why does building a personal learning plan matter? As more and more people are taking advantage of the access they have to information and social networks, their ability to use it towards continuing their education greatly increases. Being able to structure dispersed learning bolsters the ability to get recognition for it.

Anyone can take their dream and build a plan to make it a reality, whether it’s learning how to become a working class activist, a steampunk engineer, fluent in ancient languages, a better project manager, brushing up on dusty skills or making a radical decision to drop out and strike forth on your own..

SIGN UP and spread the word!

That’s right! Our brilliant staffer Chloe Varelidi (aka Challenge Power Ranger) has hijacked our next community call, and turned it into a Challenge KickOff Party:

We’re having to do some work under the hood of our servers on the weekend of the 27th and 28th of January. This work is essential to keep p2pu.org running smoothly, and we apologize in advance for any hassles this may cause you. The site will be unavailable between 3 pm and 6pm EST. And hey, why not use the downtime to lie in a hammock and read a  book.

All the best, the P2PU team

A collaborative syllabus developed by the participants in the first week.

Last week we told you about a new  P2PU School of the Mathematical Future course that blurs the boundaries of university and open learning. Developing Mathematics: The Early Years (also known as ED218 at Acadia University) has 25 participants, 7 of which take the course for credit at Arcadia University. For many people, this is their first online course, their first peer-to-peer open course, or both.

Maria Droujkova who leads the P2PU school this hybrid math course says, “the practice of opening for-credit, traditional university courses to non-credit online participants is very new. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only such mathematics education course in the world currently running. What we do here will influence where open mathematics education goes in the next decade.”

It’s not the first time a university course was offered at P2PU and wired into the traditional classroom. Joi Ito ran a Digital Journalism course that combined his Keio University students with P2PU’s learners. Inviting a disperse group of learners (P2PU) to join a cohesive location based group (Keio students) provided some obstacles. With some experimentation they were able to find a flow and produce an experience with quality.

The Arcadia and P2PU Math participants have also found a harmony. In their first week they have collaboratively built the syllabus, compiled fun media on their favorite math rich videos, and have planned out their synchronous meetings for the coming weeks. ..What could happen if this idea of inviting open groups into the classroom catches on?

I am leading a MOOC (massive open online course) this Spring. The sign-up is open January 17-22 at P2PU School of Math Future:

http://p2pu.org/en/groups/ed218-developing-mathematics-the-early-years/

The course is offered for credit to Arcadia University students, and for School of Math Future completion certificate to everybody. It has the following overarching themes:

- Personally meaningful and relevant mathematics achieved through projects, games, problem-posing and problem-solving.

- Computer-based mathematics, including interactive simulations, modeling tools, solvers, and children programming platforms.

- Lifelong learning for teachers, with the focus of online communities and networks for teacher support, and building your personal learning networks

You can learn more about MOOCs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

Join the adventure, and spread the word!

“We are convinced that to change the world we must first improve education. We firmly believe that education should be open and must be equal for all regardless of economic or social status of each.”

- Trisfera, Panama City

The totally awesome student group Trisfera of Panama is kicking off a cool mission today: “get people with little or no knowledge in web development to build a complete website in one summer.”  The group, which is dedicated to learning and development of web applications using free tools and open technologies, has set up a series of challenges on P2PU in addition to holding face-to-face meetings over the coming months.

The best part? You dont have to be in Panama City to participate, but you do need to read and write en español. Any interested person can take the Trisfera webcraft challenges on P2PU. By opening it up to the world at large they hope to “foster a collaborative learning environment where participants can share ideas, help each other and move at their own pace.”

Check out what people are experiencing at Trisfera Camp on Twitter #trisferacamp and see the first set of challenges created by the Trisfera folks on P2PU: trisfera.com/camp.

One year is a long time. A lot has happened at P2PU over the 12 months. And while this time “between the years” is always a good opportunity to look back, I struggle to sit still and not look ahead to 2012 as well. Here are some 2011 take-aways going from the very high-level right down to the personal, with a few subtle hints of what’s coming in 2012.

 50,000 ft – Change is in the Air

If you care about learning and education, 2011 was the year that made you jump up and down and run around with excitement, because things were starting to move. When we first put volunteer-run courses online there weren’t many other people trying similar things and not a lot of people were paying attention.

In 2011 people started paying attention. One reason was Clayton Christensen‘s work on Disrupting Innovation in education, which uses an innovation framework to explain the potential for changes in education. It suggests that projects like P2PU that are emerging outside of the traditional education system are part of a natural first phase of innovation, which could lead to broader changes and more direct competition with the existing system in the future. Looking at education through the lens of innovation drew people from traditional institutions, government, and the private sector into the conversation, who had previously regarded open education as something for the geeks, rather than a legitimate source of innovation.

As a result money started flowing into education projects through large government programs like the first 500 M USD grants from the Department of Labor for open educational resources as well as VC funding. It’s easy to get overly excited by the sheer number of new projects popping up every week and I have found Audrey Waters’ writing a consistently good barometer to track the things that are worth paying attention to.

10,000 ft – The Lab for Social Learning

My friend Steve Song first told me about the Zen Buddhist concept Shoshin meaning “beginner’s mind”. The idea is that there are many possibilities in the beginner’s mind, but only few in the expert’s mind, and that in order to fully understand something we must remain open to its many possibilities. P2PU is the many possibilities of taking education into one’s own hands.

Being many things is good, but you can’t be really good at many things at the same time. One of my big realizations about P2PU in 2011 was that we are really good at experimenting with all aspects of social learning online, prototyping new approaches, connecting practical work to bigger ideas around changing the education system and working with partners to help the best ideas fly. 

One example is our work with Mozilla on designing meaningful credentials for web developers, which led us to the concept of digital badges and subsequently grew into a whole Open Badges Infrastructure initiative at Mozilla. Another example is the work we’ve been doing with Karen Fasimpaur and University of California Irvine trying to figure out how formal accreditation and informal learning may work together (the answer so far is, “not very well”). A final example is our work on reimagining what an online “course” could look like. We have been thinking a lot about the problems of translating a traditional model of instruction online (quality doesn’t scale) and started experimenting with a new approach that is structured around individual learning modules and has social interaction, support and mentoring baked in.

What all of this suggests is that P2PU is a lab, which is an idea I first shared in October and which has received a lot of positive feedback since then. As a lab P2PU can foster a culture of many possibilities and at the same time apply a rigorous testing and review process to find the ideas and models that can scale – and work with partners to see them take off.

1 ft – Great People 

The people involved in P2PU are lovely. One of my favorite moments of 2011 was reading Jessica’s email about keeping the mailing list tone respectful and constructive because she wasn’t going to let anyone mess with the way in which we engage with each other. Another favorite moment was the email from Dany who sent a photo of himself in a School of Webcraft t-shirt speaking about P2PU at a huge conference in Colombia. The community workshop, where some of the core volunteers and staff come together, is my favorite event of the year – and I can’t wait to see everyone again next year.

The volunteer community will always be a big part of what makes P2PU special, but 2011 was also the year of filling our core team of paid staff members. We grew to four full-time (including myself) and two part-time positions and I couldn’t imagine a smarter, nicer, and more amazing group of people to work with. As a result my own role has also changed quite a bit and I have learned a lot about letting go of some things and focusing on other aspects of building P2PU. We still need more developer resources (including volunteers!) to make sure our tech lead can start working normal hours again, but other than that the team feels solid and well-rounded and I am super excited to think about what we can achieve in 2012.

Having more paid people also means that our budget is growing (from about 120k USD in 2011 to a projected 400k USD for 2012) and I am spending a lot more more time focusing on income generation than a year ago. We will continue to use grant income to bootstrap P2PU while we explore earned income opportunities, and we made a strategic decision to focus on donations from our core community as a way to make sure we stay true to our mission. However it takes time to build up an income stream from donations and when a few proposals that we had submitted towards the end of the year were not successful, I felt a new sense of responsibility and urgency to focus on sustainability. It’s a good feeling, because it means that P2PU has taken on a certain momentum, but at the same time I don’t want us to loose the sense of lightness that we started out with. The organization will never become the end in itself, it will always remain a means to an end – towards improving the way education works.

2011 has been a fantastic experience for me and I hope for everyone else at P2PU as well. Let’s keep learning new things every day in 2012!

Happy New Year!

P

The new year is fast approaching and with it the resolutions we make in hopes of becoming better versions of ourselves. We already know you’re hoping to shed a few pounds, spend more time with your family and simultaneously fill up your wallets – but we also know that learning never ends and that you’ve probably got a long list of things you’d love to accomplish in your lifetime. So P2PU wants to know..

What do you want to learn this year?

No matter what it is you can make it happen with P2PU. Here’s how:

Need to learn something new? You might be able to find an offering on P2PU that piques your needs and interests: http://p2pu.org/en/groups/

However, it’s likely that someone at P2PU hasn’t started something you need to learn yet. That’s where you come in. At P2PU you don’t need to be an expert to design a course or challenge. You need to be motivated and willing to collaborate with others. That’s all!

We’re looking for fun and exciting new learning opportunities to promote for 2012.

Learn how to design an awesome course at the Help Desk: http://help.p2pu.org/kb/learning/courses-study-groups-challenges

Then get started here: http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/create/

P2PU’s staff and robust community are here to help you through the design process and will promote your course when it’s ready in 2012!