Reputation-building seems to be all the rage these days, at least for online communities. This is not a bad thing; indeed, I think that many of us looking at the growing size and personalization of the Web have felt that the development of working reputation systems will be key step. In education, reputation is king, and highly reputed institutions command steep tuition and fees, and highly reputable professors are well compensated for sharing their knowledge. In education, desirability is measured by exclusivity – the lower the percentage of interested people who actually gain access, the greater the perceived reputation (and value) of that educational offering.

It stands to reason that reputation will also be crucial in open education, but here the rules have been changed, since reputation borne of exclusivity is no longer an option. The challenge, then, is to develop reputation systems that are honest, in the sense that the “currency” of reputation is authentic, and that external consideration (and perhaps validation) of reputation is transparent. In its most basic form, such a reputation system will have to demonstrate that a given educational resource (course of study, textbook, learning module, tutor, what have you) in fact improves the targeted skills and knowledge for any given learner. In other words, you need to be able to determine the student’s competency prior to the educational intervention, and then evaluate the gains made, and the difference should be positive. In my mind, this is one of the more important potential ramifications of open educational practice. Seat time and simple exposure to certain types of materials will not be (and really, never has been) sufficient.

So what are our options here? A first step might be to simply list as many web-based reputation systems as we can find. For example, Notemonk, a site that supports virtual study groups and exchanges around books, has a point system to reward people who “contribute to the community.” Similarly, the Huffington Post has a “HuffPost Badge” system to “recognize and empower HuffPost readers and users.” And we are all familiar with ratings systems, such as Digg rankings, eBay seller ratings, customer review (star ratings) for both products and sellers on Amazon, and myriad crowdsourced review sites like Yelp, Zagat, Angie’s List, and more. Some traditional reputation metrics simply migrated online, such as institutional branding (people tend to trust physics lessons from MIT more than from a random physics lessons site), popularity indices (page views, downloads, subscriber numbers, etc), and certification by agencies that position themselves as arbiters of quality (think of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval). This last category seems ripe for expansion and innovation, particularly if educators and associated institutions are willing to pay for the service of evaluating and filtering some subset of the vast pool of content on the Internet.

To ground this exercise a bit, we want to consider possible reputation systems with an eye towards specific implementation in P2PU. We are gathering pointers to existing online reputation systems on the Mozilla wiki. Any system might be of interest, regardless of the type of organization using it and the way in which it has been implemented. In the meantime, we are already fleshing some of these systems out so that P2PU can better support their use and experimentation.