Returning to Berlin brought with it a good dose of nostalgia. We held our first ever workshop there in 2009 and we wanted to reconnect to the spirit and excitement of that event. At the time many of us had never met face to face and we weren’t sure what would happen. It turned out that we were not just a group of individuals interested in similar things, but a community with a shared purpose.

P2PU in 2009

Despite all of our different backgrounds, interests, and characters, we connected deeply – both at a personal level and with the idea of P2PU. We became friends and collaborators. And we couldn’t wait to get started. At the time we didn’t want to get bogged down by a long process of defining our vision. We knew what that vision felt like and that was good enough. In order to have a compass to guide our decisions we agreed on three core values of openness, community, and peer-learning and then we set out on the journey.

Barcelona 2010

The three values turned out to be good guides for our original community, but they didn’t convey the excitement and sense of purpose that we felt. They didn’t help new people connect to the idea of P2PU in the same deep way that we had connected with it. There is a certain magic that happens when a great group of people spends four days in a room and that is hard to convey digitally. But we also never clearly articulated what it was that drew us together and that made us so committed to the idea. As we grew it became clear that we needed more than three core values. We needed something that would not only guide our future path, but that we could share with others, and that would express what we stand for. We needed to write down our vision.

Berlin 2011

That is why at this year’s workshop we spent two long sessions trying to get to the bottom of some of the fundamental questions about P2PU. We asked ourselves what problem P2PU is solving, what unique approach or ability we bring to solving it, and what it is about P2PU that we feel so passionate about. In the coming weeks, Bekka, Jane, Nadeem and I will take a stab at turning our notes into a draft vision for P2PU, but I wanted to share some of my own take-aways for those who couldn’t be in Berlin this year:

• P2PU is a diverse community of individuals who are passionate about learning. We stand for human-centered education. We are not a product or a service, but a community that creates products and services. We thrive on experimentation.
• P2PU is a way to build the world we want to live in. We foster a culture of reciprocity, of helping each other out, of giving a leg up. The education system is in trouble and we want to help rather than point fingers or complain.
• P2PU is for passion-based learning. Everyone is passionate about learning something. P2PU is a place to identify that passion and we celebrate the long tail of learning and education.
• P2PU can scale. The traditional model works well for small numbers of learners, but quality goes down when numbers go up. As a result many people don’t have access to quality learning opportunities. P2PU’s open source model can scale.
• P2PU preserves the core ideas of the university. We are not against the traditional university, but want to help preserve some of its original values such as freedom of ideas, and a culture of learning through open sharing.

In the spirit of the old musically-themed P2PU newsletters I’m asking Joe Cocker to lend a hand in closing this post.

With a little help from our friends we are able to block out the noise and listen to the voice of our hearts. It’s a little help from our friends that dares us to follow our intuition. And it’s with a little help from our friends that we can become who we truly want to be. P2PU is learning with a little help from your friends.

It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

Rather than submit a more formal presentation or poster session, I thought I’d try to get some people to help me think through a fundamental question related to certification, “do we really need certification?” The format for “Testing Our Assumptions” is brilliant for these kinds of questions. And besides, traveling half-way around the world to give a presentation and speak at the smartest people in the open education space, rather than speaking with them, seems like a wasted opportunity.

Here is my proposal. Feedback welcome, and I hope to see you at the conference.

One of the most interesting topics in the open education movement focuses on certification and credentialing of learning achievements by participants in open learning environments. The underlying assumption is that we need some form of certification, to validate what we have learned. In this session, I would like to to suggest (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we can re-imagine learning as a process that is authentic, social, and open – we might not require a separate certification process. Achievements can be evident in the learning itself.

Does learning require certification?

Certification is a signal or currency, that lets us transfer achievements to those outside of our learning community. As a student, I don’t need grades to signal my skills to those I studied with – but to those who don’t know me, my abilities, or my achievements.

If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play

Jim Gee calls testing “primitive” and the result of poor learning design, and compares students to game players. There is no need for testing in games, because each stage of the game requires some form of mastery and achievement before the player can enter.

Does good learning create evidence, which can replace credentials?

If we follow Gee, we must ask if the problem with credentials is not rooted in the design of learning environments and experience. Can we borrow lessons from game design to make learning so authentic, engaging, and social that it produces all necessary evidence of achievements as a byproduct of the learning? (Or the other way around, does the learning become a byproduct of achievements?)

I should add that I am a terrible chess player – with or without a certificate.

Thanks to Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar I’ve spent some time this week trying to make sense of the latest developments in this space. Vijay and Brandon invited me to speak to the students in their “Open Education Practice and Potential” course at the Harvard Extension School about “Opportunities in Certification of Open Education” (slides are embedded below, and there is a recording of the elluminate session as well).

My core set of slides that I use in most presentations starts with the suggestion that “the system is broken“, which I think is true but also gets peoples’ attention. I then argue that because of open educational resources the content problem is fixed, and that increasing access let’s us connect to millions of other people to learn with. Which means “now everyone can fix the broken system.” Enter P2PU. While P2PU is a good example how this is true for the learning piece of education, is it really true for the certification/credentialing? Can the open education community hack certification?

To answer this question, I decided to walk myself and the group through the steps of creating a certificate that has value and legitimacy, and use examples that exist today to highlight my points. What do you need to make a certificate?

Step 1 – You need a source of authority

In the past, this authority came from the reputation of institutions (“Nevertheless, he’s an Oxford man.”) and an intricate system of accreditation bodies and quality review structures. It’s a system that works well for disciplines that don’t move too fast, and as long as it can reasonably be true that only a small group of “experts” really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, and there are many reasons for this, even this old system often breaks down (“Oxford, New Mexico!”) and increasingly relies on seemingly random college rankings to establish authority.

While it has its’ challenges, the existing system offers great opportunities for open education projects to move from the informal to the formal learning world – and give its users access to mainstream credentials. That’s why the University of the People is bravely working towards full accreditation, which will let them issue degrees that are equally recognized as other colleges in the U.S. P2PU has decided to not pursue accreditation – it felt like we’d have to give up the most interesting things about our model in order to qualify – but instead to partner with accredited institutions like the University of California Irvine for certification (that is backed by accreditation, just not ours).

But you don’t need an institution anymore to issue certificates. David Wiley (as usual, one step ahead of the curve) already did this a few years ago in his “Introduction to Open Education” course where anyone who completed the materials could request a Wiley Certificate. But David Wiley is a Professor at an accredited University, so he is still part of the accredited system, right? Right! But you don’t even have to be a Professor, or have a college degree for that matter, to do the same. John D. Britton, Software Evangelist at Twilio and maverick geek, credentialed participants in his P2PU course by leaving recommendations on their LinkedIn profiles. And they listed the P2PU course in their education history.

Maybe the most exciting example of new sources of authority is Stack Overflow’s Career 2.0 portal. The details are worth their own blog post – but essentially Stack Overflow has found a way to surface community rankings and evaluations in a way that can replace degrees. It’s much more granular and shows the specific skills and interests a developer has, it’s transparent because it links directly to the evidence for the results, and it’s based on the opinions of thousands of fellow software developers. Stack Overflow is betting that employers get more value out of reviewing applicants on Careers 2.0 that they would get from a college degree. And I think they are right.

Step 2 – Something to show your boss, and that you can hang on your wall … your Facebook wall

It’s great to have a wall full of degrees, but very few people get to see them. Wouldn’t it be more useful if we could instead share these degrees on our Facebook wall, our wordpress.com blog, our tumblr stream, and or our LinkedIn profile? And while we are busy hanging degrees, why not also share all the other achievements we might be proud of – the fact that we took a “Vegetarian Cooking” course at the Culinary Institute, that our fellow open source developers named us a “Community Builder”, or that we solved Mozilla’s “JavaScript Expert” challenge. We are entering future territory here, but this is exactly the kind of system P2PU is working on with Mozilla (and support of the MacArthur Foundation and friends) and piloting in the School of Webcraft. An open badges infrastructure that let’s anyone issue “badges” (that’s what we call these signs of recognition) and that let’s users move them freely around the web. For details check the background materials on the Mozilla wiki and follow Erin’s blog.

This is a post about our plans for the Mozilla P2PU School of Webcraft – a joint effort to provide web developers training and certification that is free, open, and globally accessible. At the same time this is a post about P2PU as a whole – which encompasses many courses on many subjects, and even a few other Schools (like this, and this).

From prototype to product

2010 was fun, experimental, and exciting. We built a cool prototype, but didn’t worry too much about the rough edges. The original School of Webcraft was designed for ourselves and our friends (the early adopters). In 2011 we will turn it into something that works for (almost) everyone interested in web development skills. We started seeking out feedback from our users, asked advice from our friends, and put together a roadmap that will help us get where we want to be by the end of the year.

2011 will be focused on quality of the user experience, on designing a peer learning model and platform that can easily scale, and on tracking metrics that show we are moving in the right direction (or let us correct course easily).

2011 in bullet points

• Everyone is a learner – P2P is the core learning model at School of Webcraft. However, that’s not an easy switch to make – from the traditional model where an expert teaches a group of mostly passive students – to learning with peers. At School of Webcraft everyone is a learner, and everyone is a teacher. In 2011, we will introduce more granular, smaller steps, that allow new users to “level-up” their engagement with other learners and the community. We will also nudge learners to start thinking of themselves as facilitators. Want to learn something? Run a course! We will help you.
• A new platform – Good bye Drupal you old foe. We are moving to a Python/Django solution that re-uses some of the core drumbeat.org code, and adds social learning features. We already have a great community of volunteer developers (list, tracker), who are helping with UX, cutting designs, and starting to build the basic feature set. And we are just about to hire a tech lead, who will give our efforts focus, own the technology stack, and kick us into a higher gear.
• Badges – Badges are like symbols of achievement for something you have learned. Lots of people are interested in badges as a new and alternative form of certification and we’ve driven the conversation about an open badges infrastructure, where users are in control of their credentials, and credits can be moved around more easily. We just started our badge prototype (background), giving SoW users the opportunity to get skills badges (“javascript expert”, etc.) value badges (“accessibility” etc.) and community badges (“innovator”, “team player”, etc.). By the end of 2011 we’d like to see first anecdotal evidence that SoW badges help users get jobs.
• Growth – While our main focus for 2011 is quality, we also want to keep growing. More users means more experimentation, more feedback, more learning. We already have more than 700 users enrolled in courses (> 1200 for all P2PU courses) and more than 6,000 members in the community. By the end of the year, we’d like to have at least 10,000 engaged and active peer learners.

Bootstrapping P2PU

P2PU will always support many different and diverse learning communities. At the same time, it’s also true that School of Webcraft has always been a little special. First of all, we’ve had a great partner in the Mozilla Foundation whose values and ideas are perfectly aligned with ours. We want to see open learning succeed and we need the open web for that. Mozilla wants to preserve the open web, and needs more people who have the skills to build it – and traditional training doesn’t scale. Second, web developers understand our open peer learning model – it feels natural, because it’s what they have been doing all along. As a result SoW is growing very fast. In the current round 30 out of 54 courses are Webcraft courses, that’s more than 50%. And School of Webcraft is also getting a huge amount of attention, including some attention that might come a little too early – this mashable article brought down our site. As a result School of Webcraft is the perfect opportunity to bootstrap all of P2PU.

We’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign to create at least 100 new videos. This will make Smarthistory a truly viable, free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook for you, and for students around the world.

How are these two things related? In our sustainability conversation today kickstarter (and a related service called spot.us) came up and we were discussing about ways to integrate different aspects of P2PU with kickstarter campaigns. So, it was nice to see that others in the Open Edu space are looking at crowd funding mechanisms like kickstarter to support their efforts as well. Sustainability is a big issue for many OER and OCW projects – and getting the public involved is a great way to raise funds, and get a reality check on the services and value one provides. This approach doesn’t work for everything – some ideas are important, but more at the infrastructure level and might not appeal to a wide audience, but there are lots of things it could be used for. One idea was to help course organizers who can’t afford to run courses (and especially run courses repeatedly) raise funds through a P2PU kickstarter campaign – of which a small overhead charge would go towards supporting the core P2PU operations. There are lots of questions around paying for individual contributions in volunteer communities – and it has to be done carefully to not destabilize the intrinsic incentive mechanisms that are in place right now. But at the same time, tying some form of financial reward to individual courses would be a great gauge of value that users place in particular subjects, disciplines, or course organizers.

Despite its resounding success (70 million visitors so far) I have often heard criticism that MIT OCW wasn’t going far enough, that it was too focused on content only without thinking about the learner, and that many of its courses were incomplete. The thing is, that I don’t think MIT disagreed with any of these statements. Not all the materials were included, because the original OCW wasn’t designed for independent self-learners who would need all the materials openly available – it was designed for instructors and students, who would have access to journal articles and books through their libraries.

Thanks to ongoing efforts to collect data and feedback from users (MIT is one of very few open education projects that publishes stats and comprehensive evaluation reports) it became clear that the largest group of users was not students and lecturers, but independent learners. Stepping back from the direct MIT perspective, and looking at the global open education ecosystem - it is quite amazing to see this amount of demand for course materials that come without a certificate or degree. It also presented a fantastic opportunity to go even further than OCW had gone so far as an enabler for global learning.

The basic materials and course structures were already in place as part of OCW. What was missing were background documents, mainly textbooks or textbook replacements, more detailed instruction on assessment and how to make sure one had mastered the expected objectives of the course. And that is what the MIT OCW Scholar courses provide – in addition to video lecturers by some of the world’s leading experts in their fields (who at least in this case happens to be an amazing lecturers as well).

Another thing that was missing were the people to learn with. MIT recently started linking some of their courses to OpenStudy communities for questions and answers, and the Scholar courses are included. While the integration is still at the course level – and not connected to detailed components of the course – I believe that is in the works for the future. Having a space to collaborate with others, discuss questions and get support, adds to the value that MIT OCW offers already.

The integration with missing materials, and other learners presents a great opportunity for the entire OpenCourseWare movement. Partnering with small projects that innovate outside of institutional structures can help get us there. At P2PU we have been working on a few ideas how independent and informal study groups can be integrated with OCW materials – and how a feedback mechanism would bring back value to the original OCW authors and institutions. But that deserves a separate blog post.

For now – congratulations MIT for once again pushing the boundaries of how institutions can open up access to their materials, and processes, to create more opportunities for learning.

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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