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.