At SXSWedu this year, I was slated to do a hands-on session to brainstorm what makes a good collaborative learning space with strong peer learning and to begin building such a thing. The goal was to get people thinking about peer learning, to introduce them to P2PU, and to see what they came up with.

I am often not very good as fostering hands-on collaboration in a conference setting, especially when people don’t know each other. Other challenges included that this session was only an hour long and that the room was set up auditorium style with rows of seats and a podium upfront on a stage.

Despite these challenges, this session went great. Here’s what we did, what went well, and what didn’t. Thanks much to Philipp Schmidt who helped brainstorm and facilitate this.

Brief discussion of what we did: I talked for about 10 minutes, introducing the idea of peer learning and P2PU. I told people they’d be getting into groups (or they could work individually if they wanted) to brainstorm tasks for a peer learning group on ___. I gave them some suggested topics:

• How can we make our classrooms more student-driven?
• How can mobile devices be used for learning?
• How can Twitter be used for professional learning?
• How can we build a digital curriculum?
• …or create your own topic

I said they could brainstorm and/or develop on paper, in a Google Doc (in which I had set up areas for each group in advance), or in P2PU. I asked people to self-group and asked for a volunteer for notetaker from each group. See below for the slides and handout I used.

Then the rest of the time was hands on. At the end of the hour, animated conversation was still going on, and I was told not to interrupt them!

What worked well:

• At the beginning of the session, I said “This is going to be a very hands on session. If that isn’t your thing, feel free to leave.” (Maybe 2 of 45 people left. I don’t know what I’d have done if 40+ left.)
• Giving prompts for groups was mentioned as something that people liked. Everyone pretty easily grouped around 3 of the 4 topics I suggested. (We dropped one.)
• Giving choices both in topic choice, group/individual, and where to brainstorm was well received.
• Three people volunteered to be notetakers. Excellent participation!
• People rearranged the room for groupwork. Here’s what it looked like:
  
• The Google Doc worked excellently. Here are the results. I don’t think anyone used paper or P2PU (which I figured was too ambitious for this purpose). There is something magic about using a shared Google Doc for this kind of thing – it has worked for me f2f and online and even with the most reluctant groups. Best of all, now I have captured their great thinking for further iteration.

What I might do differently next time:

• Talk even less at the beginning.
• Define additional roles beyond notetaker within each group.
• Don’t have handouts. The were unnecessary.
• Would be nice to have more time to do reports out and possibly some group discussion and iteration.

I got everyone’s emails from this session to follow up. I am certain that we will collaborate further on these ideas and that you’ll see them in future P2PU School of Ed groups.

Slides I used:

Handouts

Here are streaming versions of the last two P2PU School of Ed webinars (using BigBlueButton — free, open source webinar software). Great stuff! Stay tuned for more Tuesday webinars on online learning and OER.

Teaching in Blended and Online Classrooms – Oct. 11, 2011

Additional resources:

DeLaina Tonk’s slides

Jason  Neiffer’s slides

Open High School of Utah

Montana Digital Academy

Florida Virtual School

OER in the K-12 Classroom – Oct. 11, 2011

Additional resources:

• OER Commons
  • OER Fellowship program
• CK-12
  • FlexMath
  • Free SAT Prep

On Tues., Oct. 18 at 5pm EDT (2pm PDT), we’ll be having a webinar to talk about online professional development for teachers – experiments, opportunities, challenges, peer learning and more.

We’ll have guests from several large online PD projects, but mostly this webinar will be a conversation among all of us.

The log-in for Tues. is here. Everyone is welcome. Spread the word!

Credit: theunquietlibrarian

On Tues., Oct. 11, 5pm EDT (2pm PDT), we’ll be hosting a one-hour webinar to talk about online and blended learning. Anyone is welcome to attend. (Here is the sign-in link.)

Credit: Giulia Forsythe

Webinar  – Online Learning: What works and what doesn’t?

This webinar will include several online course facilitator experts and will give participants a chance to ask questions about what works best in online and blended learning.

This webinar will feature:

• Matt Renfroe works as an Instructional Design Manager for Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest public virtual school.  In existence for 15 years, FLVS served over 200,000 half-credit enrollments last year.
• DeLaina Tonks is the Director of the award-winning Open High School of Utah. Open High School gathers existing Open Educational Resources, then augments with teacher-created materials aligned to state standards for their entire curriculum, then publicly releases it under a Creative Commons license.
• Jason Neiffer is the Curriculum Director of  Montana Digital Academy, where he has led 75 teachers in developing, adapting and delivering over 50 courses to nearly 5500 enrollments from over 175 schools across Big Sky Country.

I’ve been thinking a lot about different structures for adult online learning as the result of a couple projects I’m working on right now, including P2PU. My thoughts are along the lines of increasing participant options in their learning.

There is a fairly universal fall-off or drop-out rate after about 3 weeks in most online classes. One possible solution to this is to create a series of much smaller modules (say, 2-3 weeks long) and a flexible entry schedule. In its extreme, this could result in a structure of a half dozen 2-3 week long modules which could be started whenever by anyone who wanted to participate and completed on whatever schedule works for each learner. The modules could be taken individually or in sequence (or out of sequence for that matter). It’s also been suggested to me that in this format, an almost unlimited number of participants could be accommodated.

This kind of structure is being thought about over at P2PU, and I have thought about it for my “Entrepreneurial Marketing” course (with encouragement by some of the participants).

Some challenges for this model include:

1. A compromise of the instructional design when there are pre-requisites or content is best covered in a certain sequence
2. Lack of participant motivation to finish even a 2-3 week long module if there is no “finish” date
3. The facilitator role

I am thinking right now in particular about #3. In most online courses, a strong facilitator role in guiding and encouraging learning is a given. At P2PU, this seems less so, perhaps both because of the peer focus and because of the fact that all the facilitators are volunteers.

In my own P2PU course, I originally worried that I might take too strong of a facilitation role because of my own experience as a more traditional teacher. However, having been through the course now and listening to other facilitators and participants discuss P2PU and various classes, I think that a strong facilitator that provides solid guidance and a strong presence throughout the course is important. They don’t necessarily have to “teach” but rather act as a coach and mentor.

With a series of modules that have a rolling cast of participants though, I think this would be almost impossible. Relationships would be very difficult to form.

And as a facilitator, you’d virtually have to monitor the progress of each participant in each module individually. (In my course, this would be something like 6 modules x 3 weeks each x 40+ participants….probably a lot more with a rolling enrollment.) I’m not sure this would be feasible with a paid teaching job; it is unthinkable as a volunteer (unless of course you have a whole lot of time on your hands and don’t need to earn a living — neither of which apply to me :).

Which then takes you to the place of stepping back as a facilitator…making it more of a “virtual book club” as P2PU suggests, with participants hopefully self-forming into groups and some taking on a facilitator role independently.

While that sounds appealing, my own experience in trying to foster this kind of self-managing learning group atmosphere has not been successful. You end up with a few highly self-motivated and well-organized people learning a lot, but frankly those people could have organized their own learning from a variety of sources; they don’t need a P2PU course.

I’d be interested to know if others have experience in how this can work.

Otherwise, I’m thinking about some kind of hybrid….perhaps modular, but with a limited cadre size, fixed start and end dates for each module, and a continuing facilitator role. Still thinking though….

As a part of my working with P2PU, I have thought a lot about the peer aspect of learning and how to facilitate peer learning. Having been a more traditional “teacher” for many years, it requires some restraint on my part not to “teach,” but instead to be a peer learner (and sometimes teacher) with the others.

One thing I didn’t anticipate is that some of the participants in the course expect more traditional “teaching.” I’ve had conversations with several who have said that they value the expertise of the teacher and expected that in this course. I have been unsure of how to respond other than to try to reinforce the values of peer learning in this environment.

I need to come up with more ideas to foster peer learning. Our course participants have a wealth of experiences that I’d like to tap into more effectively. One thought is to ask participants to volunteer to lead a chat on a specific topic.

I’ve also had a couple suggestions to try some kind of team assignments. I think this could help the peer learning process, but I need more guidance on what this would look like. Because this course is very focused on marketing for each participant’s own business or enterprise, I have a hard time conceptualizing how this would work. (Also, frankly, the experiences I’ve had with team projects, from elementary to grad school, have mostly resulted in one person doing the work.)

I’ve also talked about the self-paced course idea with several people and have had varying responses. Basically, they fall into two camps: those who think it’s a great idea and those who are concerned that if there is no schedule, participants will lose motivation and structure and few will actually finish as a result. (I worry about this.)

One participant wrote to me this week (just past mid-way in the course) to ask if we could start the whole class over! I know that this was meant as a constructive suggestion and as a positive expression of dedication to the course, but it was also a little discouraging to me personally.

Another person suggested that the course be run on several tracks — one faster and one slower.

With both of these suggestions and a self-paced course in general, a big question I have is what role does the facilitator play in such a class. Any variety of these would seem to involve more work for the facilitator (and frankly as a volunteer gig, I am close to maxed out on how much time I have to spend on it as is. I am hoping that for future iterations of the course that others might offer to facilitate different “forks.”)

I suppose another option is to focus the facilitation on setting up the course and kicking it off, then spending little or no time ushering folks through their many and varied learning courses. I’m not sure that would be very successful though. I’ve participated in online courses where the facilitators greatly diminished their presence as the course progressed, and it wasn’t a very satisfying experience. But maybe that’s just the “teacher” in me needing to be involved. :)

There is a disturbing trend in U.S. education toward rigid pacing — “every student will be on page x on day y” — with a goal of controlling the “fidelity to the curriculum” and somehow ensuring quality. I think that’s a terrible idea and antithetical to learning, especially in terms of differentiating instruction for individual learner needs.

In my P2PU Entrepreneurial Marketing course, as with most other online courses I’ve participated in, I’m seeing that even less rigid pacing isn’t working well. The further we get into the course (we are now in week 4), the more the group is in different places. (This also happened in David Wiley’s first open ed class, where at some point the class revolted and insisted that we slow down to have more processing and reflection time.)

Like most online classes, my marketing course is organized by week. I’m wondering though what would happen if you organized a course like this by topic instead of week and just let everyone go at the pace that made sense for them.

My usual concern would be that doing so would make meaningful collaboration and peer learning very difficult. How can participants discuss a given topic if everyone’s at a different place? However, with the number of enthusiastic participants I have in this course, I don’t think that would be a problem. (Even now, people are still posting on week 1 forum assignments.)

Another concern I might have is that without the tension of a schedule to maintain, the course might lose momentum altogether with no one reaching the end. Again, this is less of a concern with the course I’m teaching now, but I think this may be a somewhat unique situation.

So my question for you — would a P2PU course organized by topic and not week and with total flexibility in terms of schedule work? What would be the advantages? What would be the disadvantages? Could this work?

Anyone want to try it?

We have been inspired by many pioneers that have gone before us and are still going strong today, such as these programs:

• Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools
• KaosPilots
• Digital Study Hall
• Fundación Escuela Nueva
• Aflatoun
• Youth Venture
• I-LEAD

Here are some examples of other work that has been helpful in the development of the Citizen Circles system:

The Inverted Classroom
Online learning will be more effective and it will attract and retain more students if supplemented by face-to-face facilitated group learning.

A recent meta-analysis funded by the U.S. Department of Education found that, “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” but more importantly that “the difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classe was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face. Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions.”[1]

The difference in performance between strictly online learning versus blended learning may be accounted for by research suggesting that cooperative group learning is an effective pedagogical method; “students completing cooperative learning group tasks tend to have higher academic test scores, higher self-esteem, greater numbers of positive social skills, fewer stereotypes of individuals of other races or ethnic groups, and greater comprehension of the content and skills they are studying.”

Maureen Lage and Glenn Platt of the University of Miami call this concept the “Inverted Classroom.” Lage and Platt describe a classroom in which “the Internet provides students with an excellent complement, not substitute, to their in-class efforts. The use of the Web in providing core content allows us to use experiments, group work, and other highly interactive in-class pedagogies without sacrificing course content. By integrating the Web as part of a larger program of teaching to different learning styles, we are able to reach a more diverse student population.” [2]

As Lage and Platt suggest, redefining what type of classroom leader is needed for this type of blended-learning environment will enable group-learning to be offered to a wider range of students, in a more places and subjects than ever before in history. Blended or hybrid learning models have tried to address this issue by offering a combination of online and instructor-led learning, but most institutions have still been reluctant to relinquish the importance of subject-matter expertise in the job description of the group learning leader.

The North American Council on Online Learning produced a series of studies on online and blended learning techniques, which included a survey of existing K-12 programs. The study found that “because fully online distance learning programs developed in a different place and with different methods than the use of Internet resources in physical schools, the blending of online programs and the classroom setting has been relatively slow to develop in K-12 education. However, emerging models in other countries, such as Singapore and Australia, as well as in higher education, suggest that a large part of the future of education will involve providing content, resources, and instruction both digitally and face-to-face in the same classroom.” [3]

This is from the researcher’s review of the Chicago Virtual Charter Schools:

“When teachers are with their students face-to-face, they sometimes play the traditional role of teacher in front of class, but more often they are creating small and individualized instructional plans to meet the needs, gaps, and interests of their students. Many schools strive towards an individualized approach, but for us it’s a daily reality. Unlike brick and mortar schools where the teacher introduces new material and concepts to a class, [Chicago Virtual Charter Schools] teachers play the role of detectives and problem-solvers, identifying content areas where students need clarification of concepts presented in the online curriculum. In some cases teachers are solving individual student problems, while in others they are developing group writing projects, or conducting online, synchronous review sessions for middle school children. The school maximizes cooperative learning and group decision making through whole-class and small-group, face-to-face instruction by making a conscious decision to emphasize the science curriculum in traditional classroom setting.”

Study Circles
Civic learning groups called study circles are a flexible and effective method for achieving social learning based on these new resources. They can be used by institutions or they can emerge organically for those who cannot enter those institutions. They can also improve the learning process.

There is an exemplar model of this approach in the history of the United States. Throughout the 19th century, small, community-based learning groups of 5-20 people voluntarily self-organized to explore a particular subject. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle movement served as a source of intellectual and social support for these groups and granted four-year degrees for completing study of its annual reading lists. Each meeting commonly lasted 2-3 hours and was directed by a moderator whose role was to aid a lively but focused dialogue, more so than to teach in the sense we think of today. By their peak in 1915, 700,000 people were participating in 15,000 study circles across the U.S., not including informal groups meeting in lecture halls, reading circles, debate clubs, and libraries. Study circles were particularly important to women, who, though not allowed in many cases to enter institutions, enjoyed the social interaction around learning, and could “steal moments from the waste-basket of time.”

Today, study circles are a common mode of education for lifelong learners in Denmark and Sweden. At any one time, one-third of Swedish adults are engaged in some form of adult education, and a recent survey indicates that 75% of the adult population has participated in a study circle at least once. The movement has been so successful that the government has subsidized it as a form of education since 1947 and has been used in international development by the Swedish Cooperative Centre since 1958 in to teach financial literacy, agricultural skills, and more to the poorest of the poor in East African and elsewhere..

For a detailed look at study circles, see Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Cecile Andrew’s history of Study Circles.

[1] “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”, U.S. Department of Education, June 26, 2009.
[2] “The Internet and the Inverted Classroom”, Lage, Platt, and Treglia, 2000.
[3] “Blended Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face Learning”, National American Council on Online Learning, with author John Watson, Evergreen Consulting Associates, 2008.