Ahrashs Blog

I recently published a guest post about credit and certification for open courseware (OCW) over on the OCWC blog. I abbreviated that post, so I am publishing the full version here.

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What’s in a name? Or in a certification? If I told you that I was a certified lifeguard, would you ask to see the credential, or would you take my word for it? Perhaps it would depend on the situation – you might take my word for it if I was just swimming with friends at the local pool, but you might want verification if I was going to be responsible for the safety of a pool full of kids. Indeed, if I was being employed as a lifeguard, there is likely to be some legal requirement to see proof of my certification.

And what about verifying the authenticity of the credential? Do you need to examine the certifying agency, or the criteria by which the certification was awarded? Would it matter to you if you had never heard of the agency? Presuming you have no particular expertise in being a lifeguard, or in lifeguard training programs, how can you tell a reputable and rigorous program from a questionable one? How can you know that my skills are sufficiently well developed as a lifeguard to trust me to look after the safety of every swimmer in a pool?

The challenge of accreditation is that it is really a mechanism that is designed to foster trust in the face of limited time and information. For any given relationship, you could invest countless hours investigating whether the other person is being truthful – about her interests, her skills, her experiences, and the strength of the evidence she provides in each case. But few of us have that kind of time, nor do we necessarily have the expertise to evaluate each claim to the point of “truth.” Thus, we have created a system of proxies which streamline the process. One of the best examples of a proxy which stands in for an entire suite of skills and experiences is the college degree.

When someone says that they have a college degree, we understand implicitly that the person has completed a certain body of coursework in a formal academic setting sufficiently well to garner a degree. Depending on the situation, there are a few additional pieces of information we may seek. For example, we may wish to know what specific area of study was completed. Or we may want to know the relative strength of the performance (i.e, the grades, or the class rank). Or we may want to know more about the rigor of the overall program, presumably based on metrics that feed into institutional reputation. In each of these cases, it is not difficult to imagine that there are many extenuating circumstances which would cause us to question the validity of the proxy as an authentic measure of a person’s capabilities. Some “colleges” are little more than degree mills. Other schools exhibit rampant grade inflation. Some majors don’t really prepare students for actual careers in the discipline. Objective metrics can be difficult or impossible to generate, especially for “higher order” skills like critical thinking, collaborative behaviors, and leadership. But subjective metrics are unreliable and require even more scrutiny to be sure that apparent performance is not simply an artifact of peer performance, certain personality traits, or socioeconomic status.

These challenges are persistent and non-trivial. Interestingly, because these challenges are so difficult to overcome, we seem to have embraced a situation where institutional reputations are paramount, and actual evidence for learning gains is generally ignored. We have a lot of faith that students who attend, and ultimately graduate from, elite institutions like Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, are really learning a lot. As selective institutions, they are undoubtedly already admitting some of the brightest and hardest working students out there (assuming we trust their admissions process), but we are certain that they are learning a thing or two in college as well. What things? Well, that’s trickier. And so we settle for broad, subjective assurances that the time in college is well spent, that the students develop both hard and soft skills in the service of a well rounded education, and that they graduate ready to tackle the challenges of a dynamic, changing world.

This is not a bad thing to believe. Historical and subjective evidence suggests that students do indeed gain a lot from a college experience. But putting a finger on what exactly those gains might be, how exactly they were obtained and verified, and why they matter – these are questions that defy our analytical powers. And thus, we defer to the reputation of the institution to bolster our confidence in the credential. We trust that the faculty and administrators in these institutions are working hard to protect their brand and will ensure that certain standards of educational attainment are met, whatever those may be.

And so, this brings us to the conundrum of open courseware (OCW). Open courseware refers to the online publication by institutions of higher education of course syllabi, lecture notes, and many other supporting materials, for all the world to see and use. For example, MIT has published more or less complete course materials for its entire catalog, and hundreds of institutions have joined together to form the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC), a global effort to make available the materials and resources of higher education to everyone. Furthermore, most of these institutions have published their materials using a public license, such as one of the Creative Commons licenses, facilitating the use and spread of the materials on a global level. OCWC courses have been accessed, translated, and otherwise used by millions of people, and the work of MIT and the OCWC has been a key component of the burgeoning global movement toward open education.

What OCW is not, at least not yet, is a pathway to a degree. On the MIT site, it states:

• MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.
• OCW is not an MIT education.
• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

This clarification about OCW is generally shared among the member institutions of the OCWC, so we can take MIT’s disclaimers as representative. Taking each of these disclaimers in turn, we can see that:

• An MIT education is more than simple access to the resources. Upon examination, this statement is obvious, as we know that MIT students benefit (possibly immeasurably) from the face-time with professors, peers, and others on campus, from the myriad non-digital resources that are available, and from the immersion in the overall academic environment. Simply viewing the raw information associated with courses clearly does not replicate these other facets of the educational experience.
• You have to be fully immersed and engaged in the MIT ecosystem in order for MIT to grant you an MIT degree, something that cannot be done with OCW, as far as we know.
• Access to resources is not the same as access to the faculty, many of whom are the authors of the resources. This should come as a surprise to no one, as we rarely expect to have a direct line of communication with book authors simply as a condition of buying (or borrowing) the book. But this disclaimer reinforces the point that, as already stated, access to MIT faculty is a privilege reserved for fully admitted MIT students, and access to OCW is not a replacement for the presumed educational benefits of that access.
• There are many constraints to the publication of course material, including licensing restrictions, privacy laws, inability to digitize certain things, cost, and so on. OCW, by design, is not a facsimile of the contents of a course, but rather a digital approximation of the resources subject to the constraints at hand.

Our interest here is whether there is any possibility that OCW could be used in pursuit of a degree, whether from MIT or elsewhere. At first glance, it would seem that there is no viable solution for institutions like MIT to offer degrees to online students whose only engagement with the institution is via OCW. As the disclaimers make clear, an MIT education is much more than the access to the materials of instruction, and these other elements of the educational experience do not seem amenable to online delivery.

But in fact there are many projects, including OpenStudy, Peer 2 Peer University, University of the People, Academic Earth, and others, who are working hard to replicate and perhaps even improve upon the benefits of institutional admission, but via one or more online platforms. Many of the social dynamics of education can now be replicated on the Internet. In point of fact, many of those social interactions are actually better on the Internet, given the inherent capacity of the Web to support interactions that transcend time, space, and other barriers to communication. Further, many of the most important research tools of the university are moving online, including telescopes, raw computing power, and access to relevant literature and databases. Some initiatives, such as OLI at Carnegie Mellon University, have demonstrated that some form of hybrid instruction (online and face-to-face) seems to produce the best outcomes, where students benefit from the real-time feedback of computer-mediated self-instruction, but also have an opportunity to engage with peers and professors in person.

Institutions can get into the business of offering credit for people who learn via OCW, but only if they can more coherently define the differences between learning via OCW versus learning via physical presence in institutional classrooms. The premise that face-to-face instruction is inherently superior to the rapidly developing online options is more and more questionable, so the burden is on existing institutions to illustrate how offline learning environments are different, and perhaps worthy of greater expense, in measurable and meaningful ways. I believe the value is there, but is currently hidden. Expose that value, and the barriers to institutional monetization of learning via OCW will fall away.

I have been thinking a lot about reputation lately, as one of the key attributes of the accreditation systems we use, especially for education. The fact is, the simplest way to make a snap judgment about a credential is to know something about the reputation and rigor of the accrediting institution. This is why we usually trust that someone with an engineering degree from MIT is likely to be a cut above someone with an engineering degree from some random regional college. We have all heard of MIT – surely that means something? This, at its core, is why people are willing to spend so much money to get a degree from a particular school. The name matters.

But where do these reputations come from? And are they a result of actual gains made by students at those schools, or are they simply a byproduct of only having admitted students of a certain caliber to begin with? And we can all think of examples of students who possess exceptional academic skills, yet did not attend an Ivy League institution, or even a typical four-year college.

Stephen Downes (via Tony Bates) just shared this chart (also above), illustrating the current madness of the myriad ways that different agencies try to rank and sort colleges and universities. As it says in the text accompanying the figure,

“Notice how few measures are shared by two or more raters. That indicates a lack of agreement among them on what defines quality. Much of the emphasis is on “input measures” such as student selectivity, faculty-student ratio, and retention of freshmen. Except for graduation rates, almost no “outcome measures,” such as whether a student comes out prepared to succeed in the work force, are used.”

So, in our modern age of technologies in the service of learning, after literally decades of work on authentic assessment and evaluation of learning gains, and a near-universal desire to personalize learning, we are still left with this sad fact: when it comes to institutional reputation, it appears to matter but little whether you actually learned a damn thing.

OK, so this is a lengthy post, but we are now approximately one week away from the start date of the Fall 2010 P2PU course offerings, and there is much to say. We have an incredible slate of courses to choose from, including a solid corpus of courses occupying some portion of the School of Webcraft curriculum. Exciting stuff!

And we believe that we are largely still on track to launch an initial test of some of our assessment work. To sum up the work to date:

• we are compiling a variety of perspectives on the opportunities and risks in online, authentic assessment (as well as the related process of accreditation),
• we have some initial schemas in place for understanding how the activities within P2PU can benefit from and foster assessment designs,
• we have a list of key skills related to web development which transcend core knowledge and instead illustrate the “soft skills” or “hacker’s habits” which define great web developers,
• and we have some initial specs for how we might actually assess those skills in the P2PU ecosystem.

In parallel, the P2PU team has generated a fantastic set of resources (and an associated boot camp, of sorts) for course facilitators, including pointers for incorporating relevant assessments and considering how they want to authenticate learning outcomes. We are collaborating with the folks at Mozilla, MacArthur, Carnegie, and elsewhere to design new ways of personalizing learning and accreditation, and for adapting tested reputation and evaluation systems for P2PU. It seems that things are just getting started around here…

Given that we are now implementing many of our initial designs, it seems useful to step back and think a bit about the different categories of assessment that we are dealing with, and how those categories affect our priorities and plans. Here is an initial attempt:

Automated data capture

This category encompasses all of the data that we can capture as a byproduct of people using the P2PU site (and, perhaps, other sites as well). The data might include the number of logins or page views (as a proxy for general interest), the number of courses taken, the number of uploaded resources, the number of comments to the site, etc. We might also be able to leverage back-end stats (like Google metrics) as a way to gauge broader interest and impact for certain things, like course happenings and participant creations.
For the most part, these are weak assessment metrics in that they leave a lot of room for different interpretations, and they only rarely have any direct relevance to a skill or goal that we are interested in measuring. Nonetheless, especially at scale, they may provide powerful evidence of certain types of outcomes, and they are essentially unique to online learning platforms.

Integrated and targeted data capture

This category consists of those tools and operations that are embedded in the P2PU platform and are generally systemic, as opposed to course-specific. For example, we can enable commenting features for community posts, or rating systems for courses, and so on.

These types of activities require us to actually encode the relevant tools into the system, and they can be tailored to be more less assessment oriented. Ideally, the implementation should be somewhat generic and adaptable so that the same basic tool can be used for different purposes depending on the need. As an example, we can imagine that a course facilitator might ask participants in the course to contribute a series of blog posts to the P2PU site on a specific topic, and also ask those course participants to critique those posts. The critiquing tool can be the same tool that is used in a generic fashion to “like” or “dislike” comments about P2PU, but a different version of the tool would appear for registered users of that specific course. We are working on implementing something like this already for this next round of courses.

Bolt-on assessments

This category encompasses all of the “typical” types of assessment that we usually think of: tests, quizzes, essays, etc. These are assessments are primarily designed to assess someone for some specific knowledge or skill. As such, they only make sense in context, which means that they are likely to be specific to an individual course or assignment.

Right now, the easiest way to incorporate such assessments is to do so independently; for example, a course facilitator can easily ask participants to craft an essay as an assignment and then attach it to an email or post it to a discussion board. Deep integration into the P2PU platform is not necessary. However, this “bolt-on” design makes it difficult for the community to benefit from the work, either as curious onlookers or as educational researchers. In particular, it will be difficult to compare outcomes across courses, even if it is the same course offered in different semesters, so much of the wisdom garnered in a prior course (e.g., on better or worse assignments, good pedagogical designs, etc) is likely to be lost.

It may be possible for P2PU to integrate some level of functionality for these types of assessments which enables course facilitators to select from among the various options, adapt the assessments to suit, and then rest assured that the resulting data will at least be available for other uses. But some of you who are reading this will probably be thinking, “Wait, isn’t that basically what a LMS (learning management system) does?” Yes, indeed, that approach starts to look a lot like Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, and a host of other learning platforms. Maybe there is something different about P2PU that makes this a worthwhile pursuit, or maybe we find a way to get P2PU and Moodle to talk to each other, or maybe we explore the other categories of assessment more fully to see whether this category needs as much attention as the rest of the education community seems to think.

Note that this category includes even very lightweight types of assessment, such as course reviews. If you plan to ask participants in your course whether they liked the course, then you are employing this type of assessment.

Third-party tools

This category differs from the prior category in that the assessments unambiguously leverage external applications and sites. For example, writing courses might utilize Calibrated Peer Review for peer-based assessment, or photojournalism courses might utilize Flickr as a repository and display platform for student work.

In these cases, one thing we would like to be able to do is to facilitate the process by which course instructors can determine which sites and tools on the Internet might best serve their goals. Perhaps we will eventually create a clever guide (or discover one that already exists), but for now simply asking the community for help probably works just as well. Another goal might be to get P2PU and these external applications to talk to each other more easily, via APIs or otherwise. If a course facilitator can direct participants to an external application with some confidence that the resulting output (assignments and associated data) will flow into the P2PU system, that seems ideal.

There may be other categories as well, or perhaps these categories need some additional parsing and clarification. Regardless, these categories can help us to make better decisions about priorities for implementation. To start, most of our effort has been focused on category 2, the integrated and targeted data capture. The reason for this is that course facilitators cannot easily capture these types of data on their own, and these assessments can provide value to both individual courses as well as the P2Pu project as a whole. We will also be working to direct the automated data we can capture to useful ends, such as the portfolio pages for registered P2PU users. We will be working on at least one or two implementations of category 3 assessments, but oriented more towards course feedback and community commentary, rather than traditional assessment designs. We are in the early phases of thinking about category 4 assessments and conversing with other projects and organizations about the possibilities there.

There are a number of developments related to the P2PU assessment work that are worth sharing. First, we are expecting to implement some initial options for different forms of assessment on the P2PU platform for this next round of courses. For those of you keeping track, that means they will need to be operational in one week! Fortunately, we are thrilled to welcome Joshua Gay to the project. Josh has been working on making things real for a week or two now and will be sticking with this and related projects for P2Pu and Mozilla in the coming months. Second, we are gearing up for an initial, small meeting in California focused on leveraging existing reputation and evaluation tools online, mostly NOT currently being used in an educational context. Look here in a few weeks for outcomes and next steps from that gathering. Finally, my time is becoming ever more divided and I am likely to be even more erratic in my blogging and participation going forward. I won’t be going away though – there are too many fascinating and exciting things going on! I’ll look forward to conversing and staying up with people an developments as opportunities arise.

I’d end with the P2U cheer, but I’m not aware that we have one…? Anyone want to take a shot?

The New York Times recently published an article entitled, “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review.” The article describes how the mainstream journal, Shakespeare Quarterly, opened up the review process for a special edition to whomever was interested, and was even able to compare the results of that process to a more typical panel of appointed experts by way of understanding the risks and rewards for authors. The results were positive all around, and now other humanities journals are looking to experiment as well.

This is good news. The article does a good job of comparing a few of the key distinctions between traditional peer review and more open methods. To wit:

“The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years. Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants.”

At its heart, I think much of the question of peer review boils down to whether people fundamentally believe in the core precept of transparency and replicability for ideas and research. In science, anyway, one of the first things you learn is that you need to build a corpus of evidence before you can start to claim something as true. Obviously that applies for any given study, where you should perform the experiment in such a manner that you can show that it is statistically valid, but it also applies across studies, where people should be given sufficient information to determine for themselves whether the claims are valid, even to the point of replicating the work wholesale. We have not adhered to this core principle for a long time, most notably in our failure to publish all of the raw data associated with any given study.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves as scientists and researchers, what is it we fear from transparency?

Another misperception many academics have about open peer review is that there will be hordes of lay people with little understanding of the subject matter who will see fit to comment on or attack their work. While we can certainly expect that some non-experts may read and comment on an article, the fact is that most people don’t read things that are not interesting to them or that they cannot understand. These days, expertise in any given subject area is pretty broadly distributed…. there simply aren’t enough faculty jobs around to corral all of the experts into academia. And besides, most of us spend significant chunks of our time pursuing interests as amateurs rather than professionals. I love to cook, but I have only rarely harbored aspirations to be a professional chef. Examples abound of “citizen science” initiatives where surprisingly sophisticated research is performed by volunteer communities, usually via a distributed network. While some forms of research and scholarship are not likely to lend themselves so well to this approach, it nonetheless proves that interest in seemingly esoteric research questions and capacity to meaningfully engage abounds among the masses.

Fortunately, P2PU is being built from the ground up with transparency and open peer review as core operating principles. It is this fealty to these principles that is making it possible for us to explore tricky and long-standing questions around authentic assessment (especially for “soft skills”), alternative routes to accreditation, and new pedagogies for deep engagement with learning. If our goal is to actually facilitate learning, for everyone, then we need to know if learning is not happening. The relevant data should be available to anyone so that anyone can get in the business of improving the outcomes. It would not surprise me if the insights gained at P2PU ultimately inform educational practice generally, on and offline. Indeed, these insights, or at least insights gained through a similarly comprehensive commitment to open peer review and data-sharing, will probably be the only research outcomes worth paying any attention to.

We have been trying to decide on a few key skills to experiment with in terms of assessment for the upcoming round of courses for the School of Webcraft. After deliberating with a variety of people, we have settled on “Good at answering people’s questions,” and “Good community builder.” There are other so-called “soft skills” and “hacker’s habits” which are equally fascinating and listed here. These various skills of interest to the web development community are not mutually exclusive, so we’re hopeful that our work on these two initial skills will pave the way for addressing the other skills in short order.

When considering the “Good at answering people’s questions” skill, it was reasonably straightforward to develop some key elements of that skill which are amenable to measurement and nearly universally applicable. For example, it is hard to imagine that clarity, one of the component parts of this skill, is not necessary in any circumstance where answering people’s questions is desirable.

However, in considering the “Good community builder” skill, it quickly became apparent that the component parts that might identify someone as being an excellent community builder are likely to vary depending on the circumstances. For example, someone who is adept at building a virtual community of web developers is likely to exhibit a different suite of behaviors than a person who is adept at building a community of neighborhood activists. Even if we restrict ourselves to the open web-development space, the specific manifestation of “community building skill” will probably depend on the type of project, the stage of project development, and other factors.

At first, this might seem to be a real problem. How can you evaluate whether or not someone is a good community builder if the component parts of being a good community builder are not universal? However, in reality this shouldn’t be an issue. A “community builder,” just like a “business leader,” or “writer,” or “actor,” or any other number of skilled professions and roles, is not a homogeneous category. When a person is identified as an “excellent writer,” the natural follow-up question is, “What kind of writer?” We recognize that excellent writers come in many flavors, even as we recognize that there is some shared expertise among the different categories of writers.

Here are a few quick diagrams to illustrate this point further, one that visualizes the writing analogy, and two focused on community building, where one diagram distinguishes among different activities, and the other diagram distinguishes among different stages of project development, any one (or more) of which might lead someone to be recognized for their community building skills.

Clearly, these are highly stylized diagrams. In reality, the contexts will sometimes overlap a lot, sometimes not at all, and they will vary in their generality to the “community builder” space, meaning that the interior circles will be bigger or smaller depending on the situation.

Regardless, I think the way this makes sense for P2PU is to simply acknowledge that “community building” is a heterogeneous construct, and that we will accommodate that heterogeneity by design. We can do that in a number of ways, including:

• allow people to accumulate certain numbers of sub-skills or behaviors to certain thresholds, at which point they are awarded some level of community-building distinction. For example, if there are 30 different ways that people can exhibit community-building behavior, perhaps mastery of any 10 of those ways garners a “community builder” mark.
• categorize subsets of behaviors into logical groupings according to specific contexts, and then award the “community builder” mark to those people who exhibit every behavior in a category.
• simply ask members of the community who seemed most like a “community builder,” acknowledging that different people and communities may have different reasons for that determination.

There are others as well. The great thing about P2PU in this case is that it is naturally set up to provide correlative evidence of those skills and behaviors that are associated with community building. In other words, if someone is flagged as being a good community builder, we are in a position to study what types of activities that person does in that community which lead people to call him or her a community builder. The possibilities here are nearly endless! You can help frame up some of the ways that we think about community building by visiting the wiki and jumping in.

In any group of students, in any educational setting, we can assume that different students have different motivations towards learning. Some students are going to be deeply interested in the material, striving to learn no matter how challenging. Some students will have very specific needs, usually motivated by some project or responsibility which they are seeking to complete. Some students are going to be motivated primarily by the grades and degrees and other externally visible metrics that might support their larger ambitions. Still other students will just go through the motions of learning, perhaps to fulfill requirements or expectations set by others. And in some cases you may have students actively resisting all opportunities for learning or engagement. We are fortunate in P2PU that we are unlikely to encounter the last two categories of student given that this is an informal, opt-in system; however, as P2PU grows and meaningful routes to accreditation and competency are developed, this situation might change… something to watch out for.

Here’s one way of visualizing this diversity for P2PU:

In the diagram above, the blue ellipse is the “P2PU community,” which can be construed however you like. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend it contains all registered and potential participants, and all running courses, in a P2PU “semester”.

The small circles represent registered individuals in the system. Each individual has a particular portfolio, including a suite of interests in P2PU and a suite of prior experiences/expertise which might affect their choices of courses as well as the manner in which they engage with each course. Much of this diversity will be opaque – those individuals are rendered in the background blue color. However, some individuals will have opted into P2PU-supported pathways which identify their particular orientations. In this case, we can imagine that the colors represent the expectations each individual might have for “certified outcomes” of any given course, as follows:

Note that not every course will be able to easily accommodate the full diversity of aspirations. For example, if a course is designed to require high levels of peer engagement and collaboration, then it may not work for someone to just survey the course. Similarly, some courses may not be set up to enable accreditation or certification in any robust manner.

The dashed squares represent individual P2PU courses. Obviously, the specific placement (and the cap on 16 participants) is arbitrary. There are six total courses represented here. The main point of the diagram is to illustrate that any given course is likely to contain a heterogeneous body of participants, and much of the variation is likely to be invisible. In some cases, it may be necessary to ask potential participants to reveal more about themselves up front so that they can be properly oriented within the structure of the course. But this also presumes that course facilitators will have considered the ways in which the course can differentiate among these different participants and still operate as a cohesive peer group. Since that is likely to be difficult for many presumptive course facilitators, we should also build independent pathways to portfolio-building and accreditation which students can opt into even without any overt support from their course peers or facilitator. In this case, we will need to provide a lot of general information to potential P2PU participants detailing how they can get more out of courses and how much of what they want is their responsibility to see through. My recent post on the effort:outcomes relationship considers this challenge more closely.

There. That’s the charge. Now we just have to make it real.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article on June 30 entitled, “Is Globally Democratized Learning Always a Good Thing?” by Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman Foundation. The question is a good one. And while both Mr Wildavsky and the Kauffman Foundation have admirable records of engaging with and supporting educational innovation, I read his post with some dismay given the simplistic and stale straw-men that he used by way of addressing some of his concerns.

Many of my concerns were ably addressed by Geoff Cain in his comments, so I will just add a few more observations. I think Mr Wildavsky would be hard pressed to find anyone who simply dismisses expertise as irrelevant to the educational enterprise. Among the many colleagues I have who are actively seeking to democratize education at a global scale, expertise is highly valued and eagerly sought after. The problem with too much of our formal educational system is that the manner in which that expertise is tapped is inefficient at best and ineffective at worst. And we have decades of solid research pointing to the hierarchical nature of our classrooms, and the resulting pedagogies that we practice, as one of the most important culprits in perpetuating these sorry outcomes. For too long we have been operating on the assumption that education is something we do to people, rather than something we pursue together.

The new DIY, peer-learning, and/or tech-enabled educational opportunities do not eschew expertise; on the contrary, they provide the means for learners to assemble a body of expertise (as resources or people) which best meets their needs and preferences. There is no question that some people will need more guidance in this process than others. Indeed, some people will definitely have to be pushed through an educational program, especially when concerned with knowledge and skills that are deemed crucial to functioning in society (like basic reading and math). But for the majority of us, the democratization of education means that we can pursue and maintain our innate interests in learning, rather than have it denied to us outright or beaten out of us in stultifying educational settings that are out of touch, too expensive, and demeaning to all concerned, especially the experts.

In our ongoing work on alternative routes to accreditation, it has become clear that the solutions we provide are going to require a “contract” of sorts with P2PU course participants who desire these higher-value outcomes. I have tried to visually capture the relationship between effort and outcomes in the diagram below.

The “Low-value, high effort” section is presumably of no interest to anyone. We have sayings for this section, like “counting grains of sand on a beach,” and the like.

The “High-value, low effort” section is mostly a fiction, though I would argue that this is essentially what our current higher educational system promises to people. Actually, the promise is more akin to “You have already put in your time, money, and effort – reap the rewards of your performance to date by coming here, acquiring our good brand, and benefiting accordingly.” Note that this category requires that some entity vouch for the quality of the learning outcomes because there is little or nothing more to go on. I would say that P2PU should take pains to avoid this category; it’s a rat hole.

It is the “Value mostly reflects effort” section which is most interesting, and most relevant for P2PU. The key is to develop and honor an honest contract of sorts between P2PU and course participants whereby each party understands what is actually expected of them. For participants, this means recognizing that the “value” of a P2PU course will depend substantially on the person’s ambitions and effort. For P2PU, it means not promising that which cannot be offered; even if P2PU is not the accrediting agent, it is still necessary to facilitate passage towards accreditation if a claim is made that such a thing is possible with P2PU courses.

Thoughts?

This project, like so many projects, would benefit from employing some robust, data-driven, dynamic visualization tools to help us better map out competencies, illustrate relationships among concepts, and share insights. This is always a struggle. If you know of any good tools for taking networked information (like in a relational database) and rendering it easily into a concept map or network diagram, let us know.

As an example, I generated a quick diagram of the content and pedagogy curricular categories using the Text 2 Mind Map application, pasted below. It’s really simple and cool, but it can’t actually diagram networked relationships, only hierarchical ones. Oh well.

From P2PU