That said, I think that there are lots of possibilities to explore here. Dirk identified two of the forces in action in university courses: social pressure and financial pressure. It may be worth trying variations of both of these in P2PU courses. Perhaps each course could carry a (nominal) fee, which is fully refunded upon completion of the course. As for social pressure, I think this is most effective when it comes from people you know. For the course description that I just submitted for the School of Webcraft, I tried to leverage that: “…Our approach is highly collaborative, so we’d encourage you to take this course with a friend or two.” I’m interested to see if that helps.

Perhaps part of the issue stems from the tension between being an online community and holding an online class. The people who initial lurk at the edges of the P2PU network may slowly, over time, drift towards the more active core. Each class, however, has a fixed beginning and ending date, and the goal is for everyone in the group to be present and participating for the duration of the course. Dron and Anderson make a distinction between the structure of groups and networks: blog post and subsequent paper). I’ve found this to be useful, and you may, too.

Where I slightly diverge from Dirk’s point is that even though the reason for someone to drop out might not be a problem, their leaving the course community will have a negative effect on other peer learners.

But we should be able to make it easier for users to decide if they want to take a particular course or not. This includes a better description of what it means to take a P2PU course, and a detailed outline of the course content including assignments and tasks. I think they main challenge is the first point – conveying how P2PU courses work – because by definition all of our course content is free and open anyway. We are currently working on a short list of bullet points that would help users understand what is expected of them – and we are considering some kind of social contract that users enter with the other peer learners when they join a course.

Do you think that would address some of the issues?

Many people complete courses because of financial pressure (having paid for a year at university) or social pressure (friends and parents). If they could have opted out without too many consequences and pursue something better suited, then completing a course could be wasting time.

I think the disagreement is actually more a misunderstanding related to the difference between P2PU and “normal” online education. For Alison and myself it’s implicit that in P2PU all content and interaction between peers are open – as a result everyone can lurk by default (everyone has “read-only” access as phorque puts it) and we completely encourage that. So, we are pro lurking.

However, once someone becomes a participant in the course (a learning peer) that person takes on a different status. She/he takes up resources – in terms of time from the course organizer as well as the other peers. And I would argue that joining a P2PU course constitutes agreeing to a social contract – of supporting each other throughout the course.

Gary’s concept of dabblers is intriguing and I am not sure where I stand on this (assuming that a dabbler could participates in half of the course, but bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and then float away). That is not necessarily a bad thing. Although I would argue that it does lower the strength of social ties and might cause more confusion and frustration than benefit.