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Mozilla School of Webcraft at P2PU

Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible.

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered by learners, mentors and contributors like you. Our goal is to provide a free pathway to skills and certification to help people build careers on open web technology.

Existing developer training is expensive, out of touch, and out of reach. We leverage peer learning powered by mentors and learners like you and self-organized study groups. We use existing open and free learning materials.

In this sixty minute session we’ll briefly cover the inception of the Peer 2 Peer University along with details and success stories from the first three cycles of courses. We’ll then dive into more detail about our collaboration with Mozilla Drumbeat including Mozilla’s mission to engage the next million Mozillians. We’ll present the P2PU School of Webcraft, and a case study of courses offered so far, including the first course, ‘Mashing Up the Open Web.’ Additionally, we’ll introduce our plans to separate learning from assessment and our community driven credentialing system.

At the end of the session we will invite the audience, and all of SXSW, to join a course on open web skills to be offered during the week of the event. Read more: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/one_pager

The Peer 2 Peer University is gearing up to launch its third cycle of courses this coming September, and we’re looking for new faces to join the community. Do you have an idea for a six week course? Whether it’s Physics 101 or Poker and Strategic Thinking, all ideas are welcome. You can propose a course at http://wiki.p2pu.org/Create-a-Course (deadline is August 6, 2010).

Full post at http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2010/07/23/p2pu-call-for-courses/

Dick asked me for a few readings to distribute in advance. I sent him the following, but would love suggestions on what to add to the list.

• Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
  David Wiley and John Hilton III
  http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/768/1414
• Breaking Higher Education’s Iron Triangle: Access, Cost, and Quality
  John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic
  http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/March-April%202009/full-iron-triangle.html
• Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
  John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler
  EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32
• Short video intro to P2PU
  http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2010/04/29/p2pu-the-speakeasy-of-open-education/
• If students have access to the early chapters of the following book, I would also recommend:
  Disrupting Class
  Clayton M Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson
  http://books.google.com/books?id=wiBcUl44FEcC&lpg=PP1&dq=disrupting%20class&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

He was nice enough to offer his digital camera to record – and, voila, video blog number 2. As I am trying to better understand the value of video (thanks Stian and John for comments) this conversation approach definitely makes a lot more sense to me.

Leave a comment if you want to meet me in an exotic location to talk about open education! And I promise I’ll get better at keeping my dopplr account up to date.

Video blog 2 – Brandon Mura/MIT – Beyond Content from Philipp Schmidt on Vimeo.

It’s a first attempt at video blogging. I am still a little uncertain which types of messages and comments video is better suited for than written blog posts or audio recordings, but no better way of finding out than trying. Any comments on content, format, presentation are much appreciated.

Videoblog 1 (21 April 2010) from Philipp Schmidt on Vimeo.

I was talking to the other P2PU founders last night and realized that while in my head, the open accreditation work at P2PU all fits together nicely, I hadn’t articulated well how all the different pieces together make a pie. This earlier post has a summary of early thinking on open accreditation. But we have added a number of things to our original plans since then:

• The P2PU/Mozilla Open Web project is taking off. The idea is to create an alternative career path for people who want to become web developers or designers: curriculum with the latest open web technologies, assessment that looks no just at technical skills, but also employment relevant soft skills, and a trusted certification with the P2PU/Mozilla brand. We have a drumbeat page to reach out to the community and John Britton, who is running the first open web course at P2PU, was contracted by Mozilla to coordinate the curriculum development part. Mark Surman and I started talking to more people at SXSW recently to pull them into the curriculum conversations. The idea is to form a larger community of experts who can help us identify the core skills needed by web developers, and design a set of courses that build those skills. If you are one of them or have recommendations, leave a comment here or sign up on the drumbeat page.
• The piece that had been missing in the P2PU Open Web project was assessment of soft skills, some call them ‘habitus‘ or ‘disposition‘ — it’s things like an attitude towards problem solving, leadership skills, the ability to communicate well with users and clients, and a sense of curiosity that makes some developers stand out. When we speak to employers, they rarely mention technical skills, those are assumed to exist. Employers want to see “work that was done” and have an interesting conversation about that work with the applicant. They also want to make sure that new employees fit into the culture and are able to work well with the existing team. A university degree has low predictive power in these areas. At the Mac Arthur Foundation grantees meeting, I spoke to Mimi Ito about our interest in assessing these skills, and she introduce me to a number of fantastic people in her network who are doing work on assessment. Together with Ingrid Erickson (based at the SSRC and involved in a range of Mac Arthur projects) we hope to bring together the different communities (assessment researchers, open web developers, curriculum designers, P2PU, Mozilla, outreach partners) for a small workshop some time in May. The goal is to design a few meaningful assessment models that we can then implement (aka write software and design processes to support) and pilot for the web developer courses.
• Our bigger workshop, provisionally planned for September at this point and supported by funds from my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, will then allow us to step back and review what we have done in the P2PU/Mozilla Open Web project, look at other ways for assessment and certification, including community reputations, and develop a more strategic approach on open accreditation for P2PU. We are thinking of ways to reach out to the broader research community to get a better idea of the scope of work that is already happening. I expect that we will find interesting things in areas not typically associated with learning and ranging from collaborative filtering, and community reputations to semi-automated text analysis.

As you can see, we are biting off a bigger open accreditation piece than originally intended. And in order to pull all those pieces together we are planning to bring on a part-time consultant shortly.

Dear OCWC community,

The OCWC Board of Directors is delighted to announce that Mary Lou
Forward, of Brattleboro, Vermont, has accepted its offer of the OCWC
Executive Director position.  Mary Lou comes to us from SIT Study
Abroad, where she has served as Academic Dean of African Studies since
2000.  (…)

As you are likely aware, the position of Interim Executive Director has
been filled for the past nine months by Terri Bays of Notre Dame. 
The Consortium could not have succeeded as
it has in the past year without Terri’s tireless efforts to move the
organization forward.

Please join the members of the Board in welcoming Mary Lou and thanking Terri for her effort.

Sincerely,

Steve Carson
President  |   OpenCourseWare Consortium

For the purpose of teaching her undergraduate chemistry course, Karen developed notes and materials for her students, because she knew they could not afford the textbooks. The course is broken into two modules, and really needs two textbooks, but the students simply would not be able to buy more than one. So she took a set of hand-written slides that had been passed down from lecturer to lecturer, and modified a thousand times in the process. These notes were not ready to be printed for the students. She copied the basic structure from the notes, looked at the way textbooks presented the material, and pulled it together into a comprehensive study guide for students. The guide has empty spaces that students fill in during the lectures (or through their independent study). I am not a chemist and would not be able to comment on the quality of the content, but the structure makes a lot of sense to me! And these types of materials that consider both the subject matter and the way it can be taught, are likely to be most useful for students and lecturers in other institutions.

At the end of our meeting Karen described the tension she felt about OpenCourseWare. On one hand she wants to believe (and is excited by the idea) that sharing and openly collaborating will help everyone get better educational content. On the other hand there is hesitation. Will the community embrace the materials, and send feedback and improvements? Or will others just comment on what is missing and should be better, but not engage meaningfully? Is the extra effort of publishing the content online justified, when she could also develop more materials focused on the needs of her existing students?

In the perfect world, OCW publishing should just be part of the normal practices (one-click OCW publication) and no extra effort. That’s what we should work towards, but we are very far away from that situation in most institutions today. The course materials that most lecturers use to teach their courses, and which are perfectly adequate for classroom teaching, are often not not quite ready to be published. Not because they are not good, or because they contain wrong information, but because they were written by the lecturer for her own use – a lot of information is tacit, and in the lecturers head, but makes no sense to outsiders without further explanation.

Karen agreed to publish her course today and we’ll hopefully have it online in the next few months. I’ll let you know when it’s up – so that the OER community can help us convince Karen that she made the right decision to “share nicely”.

PS: Thanks to Jon Udell for challenging all of us at the recent OCWC global conference to make blogging part of what we do (because unlike publishing OCW that’s not a big step). I wrote the whole post during the meeting, and feel like it helped me clarify some of my thinking on these issues.

There are case-studies, prototyping, web-seminars and we are looking to discuss lots of innovative new ideas. The announcement is on the course wiki here.

From the P2PU perspective this course comes at the perfect time. One of the biggest challenges for us has been to find a technology platform that is light-weight, does not need major tweaking, keeps up with new developments by letting us plug web 2.0 services into it, and supports open standards. So, one goal for us is to get more ideas from the course, on how to set up a volunteer-run open online university. Piece of cake, right?

Anyway, have a look around the course wiki to see if the course is interesting for you – and consider signing up. Space is limited and first come first serve!

Unfortunately, the Chronicle’s content is mostly non-open (unlike the P2PU), but we have been told that they will also mention the project on the Wired Campus blog, which is public and allows comments.

At the moment, www.peer2peeruniversity.org is just a basic site with a few pages that explain what the P2PU is and how to get involved. We are currently confirming tutors and sense-makers (kind of like Professors, but they don’t have to have a PhD or a title, they just need to know their fields really well) and are hoping that the press coverage will encourage more people to join. It’s an open community project in the true sense, so anyone with a good idea, and some time on their hands to help is welcome!

If you are interested in finding out more, head over to www.peer2peeruniversity.org, send an email to thepeople@peer2peeruniversity.org, or sign up to the mailing list.

Those of you that came to the workshop at Open Education 2008 will see some of your ideas in the latest version of the concept document. That workshop really pushed us to get from “thinking” about this, to “doing” something about it. Thanks to everyone who was there – you will see that many of your ideas helped us clarify what we were trying to achieve.

Disclaimer: The web-site was built using Google Sites, but only because we didn’t have much time and thought this was the quickest way to get started. Unfortunately there are some things about Sites that make it pretty useless (no RSS feeds, hello?) and there might be privacy issues, but don’t jump on us! We are currently thinking about technology options for hosting the actual P2PU.

Image (licensed CC-BY 2.0) courtesy of flickr.com and g-hat