In the last few weeks two things have happened that will go a long way towards achieving this goal. P2PU started talking to One Click Orgs and I decided to run a P2PU course on open governance, so that I could ask some of my questions more formally and find others who might be interested to explore them together.

One Click Orgs helps open communities to set up governance structures that allow them to become legal entities (with all the security and power that comes with that – actually little power, and a lot of hassle) while preserving their essential dynamic and participatory nature. They started working with UK community organizations, are currently applying their ideas, technology and model to a UK charity (a non profit organization), and are excited to look at doing the same with us for a US based 501(c)(3) (same thing, non profit organization, but different country and laws). I had been struggling with the idea of establishing all the traditional rules and structures that typical non-profit organizations have, because they felt so foreign to the way things worked at P2PU. And I was worried that by creating structures, we would invariably change the dynamics. It was wonderful to hear Charles Armstrong from One Click Orgs articulate exactly these kinds of issues – and even go one step further and explain how much of the paper-based procedures that are required by law, and which are highly annoying, can actually be virtualized using the open web.

Open Governance course. In this coming round of P2PU courses (sign-up opens next week 25 August – mark the date!) I will facilitate a course on open governance. If you are interested in working together on some of these questions, please consider signing up. If you have some thoughts or experiences to share, but are too busy to commit to the whole course, please do get in touch with me anyway – or leave comments and feedback on the evolving course outline. I am only starting to structure this study of open governance, but there are three concepts that seem like good vantage points from which to explore open governance: transparency, leadership, and participation.

Before going into these ideas in more detail, I thought I’d post a few notes on how P2pU makes decisions today. Looking at the structures that have evolved it is easy to see the tension between the underlying principles and values and the pragmatic realities of trying to move quickly and efficiently. Of course, the argument around efficiency is the most common, but possibly also the worst excuse to not be open. Anyways, P2PU currently has two spheres of governance. An open community mailing list that is open to all, but in practice the people who lead the discussion and work out the details of what P2PU is and does are a small group of committed volunteers (referred to informally as the gang-stars, because of the original mailing list that was titled “the gang”). And there is a second list for the five founders, that is closed and private, where we discuss things that are difficult to do in a public forum – questions about money, strategic partnerships that are just emerging, and ideas that could be fairly significant for P2PU and need a first reality check before one explores them further.

So what are some of the things we are rubbing up against (these are examples for the kinds of things I would like to discuss in more detail in the course)?

The gang list used to be private (but not really closed as anyone who made a significant contribution was invited to join) and a wonderful space for discussion. There was an awesome sense of community, camaraderie, and the conversations freely ranged from very high-level philosophical ideas about the future of education, to the color of the button on the home page. Amidst a lot of good natured joking the vibe was extremely respectful and tolerant. As P2PU grew we started rubbing up against the limitations of having a safe, but fairly small space that was reserved for people who had already made a contribution. Many of us would meet interesting people at conferences, who would have great perspectives and ideas to contribute, but there would be no way to easily bring them into the community discussion. We we were worried about loosing the vibe of the gang list, but decided together that opening it up was the only solution. Now p2pu-community has a new name and anyone can sign up. It is difficult to say what has changed – maybe it is a little bit less wacky, and maybe some of us are a little more guarded in our comments – but the “community” does feel a little different from the “gang”. But even if it is not just the illusion of my sentimental memory, I also see that the benefits of the open community list are much more obvious. It is now much easier for amazing people like Joe and Jessy to just sign-up, chime in and help us do more things better.

One thing that worked well on the council list (remember, closed and private for founders) was our ability to make decisions quickly and efficiently, and the trust that we had in each other’s vision and integrity. The problem is that the amount of decision making required started becoming overwhelming – and that for some of the questions we had originally discussed in the council list, it turned out we were maybe not the best ones to discuss or decide (or at least not without more people involved). We haven’t made any changes to the council list yet, but in the coming months, we will try to understand how it too can evolve – in the same way that the gang has. In the context of incorporation, we have to also clarify its role and responsibilities with respect to a board of directors, who are legally responsible for the organization (and required by law in the US). So … I think it’s clear that there are many more fascinating and challenging questions ahead and I hope some of you will be interested in joining me to explore them.

We need your help to get to Austin, Texas:

1. Please register for an account on the panel picker website: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
2. Confirm your email address
3. Vote up our proposal.
4. Leave comments and start a discussion

Please pass this along to as many people as you can. If you tweet, RT this.

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/

While inspiring (and confusing) we needed something a little more electronic – so that others can edit/iterate on it, and we can refine it easily as we learn more about the competencies that our graduates want and how to map them against the courses we are offering.

Since I am interested in graphs and this is a problem I have encountered before, I spent a little time investigating our options (mostly by sending out questions to people smarter then myself and trying to understand their answers). I ruled out using a diagram editor that has no underlying logical representation of the graph – in other words, it’s not a graph, it’s a drawing of a graph – since drawings don’t evolve in sync with the underlying data. With that out of the way, there seemed to be two main alternatives:

• Use a Mindmap – There are a number of good open source projects that look suitable to the task. There doesn’t seem to be a standard file format yet and the easiest would have been to agree on one application and use its native file format. There are also some nice online mindmap tools that let you store the mindmap in the cloud so that a group of people can edit it and you don’t have to deal with versioning and sending files around.
• Use the .dot language to create the graph structure and a visualization tool to make it look pretty. This seemed the more compelling way to go, because we have more flexibility of the graph structure, it’s really simple to get started (but can get very complex if you want), and anyone can edit it using nothing but a simple text editor (there is only one editor of course, and that’s VIM )

The .dot file looks something like the following (click here to see the complete file):

graph G {

e [shape=ellipse, label="HTML", style=bold];
f [shape=ellipse, label="What is markup?"];
g [shape=ellipse, label="Basics of Layout"];
h [shape=ellipse, label="Document order vs. display order"];
e -- f;
e -- h;

....


While I was working on the graph structure, I used the excellent OSX implementation of Graphviz to check my work. The fact that Graphviz seems to be getting a new boost of input – I think the original author managed to move the project to AT&T – was another selling point for using this solution.

However, we also thought it made sense to have a slightly more polished (with colors!) version of the map that we could show to non geeks. I downloaded a trial version of OmniGraffle (and am very tempted to purchase a license) which let’s you open a .dot file and then manipulate the graph. Unfortunately, you can’t make changes and export them back as .dot, but I didn’t really need to do that anyway.

Here is the “pretty” version made with OmniGraffle:

If you need a text based graph structure, but also want nice looking graph visualizations – this might be a solution that works for you as well.

Update: The ultimate solution would be an import of our .dot file into this (thanks John!).

Call for course organizers is below:

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a great place to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we’ll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we’d love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community – so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we’ll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We’d love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we’re inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We’ve made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course -> Fill out this short form.

If you’re unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

If you are interested in taking a course -> add your name.

Join the P2PU Webcraft community -> subscribe to our mailing list.

When we ran our pilot, many in the P2pU community including myself were shocked to see drop out rates above 50% in most courses. We had some courses where only very few people continued to the end. Our surprise was genuine, but maybe naiv (not a bad thing I would argue). It turns out that our completion rates were no worse (or better unfortunately) than those of online education in general.

I quote from Berge and Huang (who reference others)

Historically, the percentage of students who drop out of brick and mortar higher education has held constant at between 40-45% for the past 100 years (Tinto 1982). In the online learning context, dropout rates appear to be higher than for traditional courses. While there are no national statistics for completion rates of distance education students, dropout rates are believed by some to be 10 to 20 percentage points higher than for in-person learning (Carr 2000; Diaz 2002; Frankola 2001).

That means drop out rates between 50-65% are considered to be a reality in online education. Wow! (I haven’t done a comprehensive literature review, but some of the articles that are widely referenced are listed at the end of this post.)

I could try to make the argument that this is a success for P2pU – since our drop out rates are no worse, even though we do not offer any of the usual carrots (degrees) or sticks (fees) that keep people going usually. But unfortunately that would not be good enough. The P2PU learning model is based on a strong sense of community between peers – individuals who help each other to learn. Seeing peers drop out over time is terribly frustrating not only for the course organizer (I know, because I have spent a significant amount of time on instant messenger with course organizers who felt personally responsible and took each drop out very hard) but also for peer learners, who looser their peers.

The second argument I come across frequently when drop out rates come up, is that a high percentage of participants in online courses will only lurk and we shouldn’t worry about that. There is a whole book shelf of academic literature on learning by lurking and the invisible student. I am not arguing that lurkers are not learning anything, but in my personal experience and that of P2PU, it is not the lurkers that benefit most but the doers, the tinkerers and the creators – and that those are the people you will want to take a course with. It’s no fun to be in a room full of invisible students.

That’s why P2PU is aiming for low drop out and lurking rates. Very low ones. It’s always dangerous to nail your colors to the mast, but I would go so far to say that in the perfect P2PU course, less than 10% of participants drop out or don’t participante. (Please note that this is me speaking in my personal capacity – and not necessarily the opinion of the P2PU community!)

I think there are many aspects of online courses that can be improved to reduce drop out rates and increase participation, but two fundamental things that enable us to shift from more than 50% leaving to something much better:

• Make it difficult (to join) – In our pilot phase (as well as the first round of courses we ran this year), it was too easy to sign-up for a course. As a result many people signed up because the courses “sounded interesting” without really asking themselves if they were ready to make the commitment necessary. By increasing the sign-up hurdle, we can help users think more carefully about joining a course. This hurdle should not be designed to test expertise or intellectual capacity, but motivation. If someone puts in a few hours of work to complete and submit their course sign-up form – they should be allowed to join.
• Make it personal – The interaction between participants is crucial in creating a social bond that helps people keep going when their busy lives pull them in other directions. One participant in the pilot stated that she knew one of the other participants by name (and assumed the same was true in the other direction). She said she struggled to keep up with the work, but pulled through and completed because she didn’t want her colleague to think she was a quitter. By increasing personal interaction at the beginning of the course, the social ties between participants can be strengthened. Asking participants to upload photos of themselves helps with identification – and as we feel ourselves learning more about others, we assume they learn more about ourselves – and we start caring about their opinions.

Some research on drop out and non completion:

• Berge, Z & Huang, Y (2004) A Model for Sustainable Student Retention: A Holistic Perspective on the Student Dropout Problem with Special Attention to e-Learning. DEOSNEWS, Volume 13 (5) http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deosnews/deosnews13_5.pdf
• Carr, S. (2000, February 11). As distance education comes of age, the challenge is keeping the students. Chronicle of Higher Education, A39. (needs subscription)
• Diaz, D.P. (2002, May/June). Online drop rates revisited. The Technology Source. (online version).
• Frankola, K. (2001). Why online learners drop out. Workforce, 80, 53-58. (online version).
• Tinto, V. (1982). Limits of theory and practice in student attrition. Journal of Higher Education, 53 (6): p.687-700.
• Tyler-Smith, K. (2006). Early Attrition among First Time eLearners: A Review of Factors that Contribute to Drop-out, Withdrawal and Non-completion Rates of Adult Learners undertaking eLearning Programmes. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. (online version).
• List of articles on the topic at Learning Light.

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

There are a few problems with money. One is that (at least it seems that) there is no way to pay everyone in open source projects. If Wikipedia had worked out a complicated payment mechanism for all contributions, it would most likely not have grown into the amazingly vast knowledge repository it is. Two, while it is very well possible to get paid while doing things for love, money also makes people to do things they don’t love. And we want everyone involved in p2pu to be in it for the love. However, not having money in the volunteer community also creates problems – the main one is that it keeps out those people who simply can’t afford to work for free, and often those are the ones that represent the majority of people on this planet. Pretending that everyone has the same freedom to volunteer is not just wrong, but also a strategic mistake for a global project like P2PU. So, let me wonder out loud how a volunteer community driven by love could avoid starving:

Idea 1 – A big pile of gold. What if we had a “pile” of let’s say 10,000 USD and every gang-star (gang-stars are volunteers with a long history and commitment in P2PU, think of them like module owners or similar positions in open source projects) could charge a certain hourly rate against this pile for project relevant activities that they could define relatively freely. People would simply report hours and achievements online and at the end of each month we tally up and pay out. I really have no idea if this could work – and can think of lots of potential problems (conflict between those who charge and those who work for free? who gets to say that someone is charging too much?).

Idea 2 – Check the list. An alternative would be to outline specific projects that we need done and earmark budget for them – and gang-stars can decide to take them on. that might be a little more structured and comprehensible – and maybe with less potential to lead to conflict?

Idea 3 – Make our own money. Or we could work with an imaginary currency (mullahs) and people accrue mullah’s for work they do. each month they can decide to trade mullahs for real money (1 mullah = 1 USD) or horde them for things like participation in the community meeting (1000 mullahs?).

If you know how to make money from love (as in alchemy, not roxanne) let us know and share the magic.

Linus has developed what amounts to a new way of managing large-scale projects involving huge numbers of geographically-dispersed contributors. Although the final decisions rest with him, he takes them in consultation with a wide range of coders. He is constantly involved in discussions on key mailing lists that allow important issues to be raised by anyone. Ultimately, then, he leads in part by being able to sense what the collective will of the Linux development community is on particular issues, and by not straying too far from it.

Now, there is only one Linus, but I believe that general approach is starting to move out into other spheres. In part, that’s because adaptations of the open source development methodology – based on a modular, distributed, collaborative development model – are being applied in more and more fields, from content to science and even to government. That approach brings with it a need for a different kind of management: top-down just doesn’t work in these circumstances. And so, as well as the novel business model that free software implies, discussed in my last column, it has also engendered a radically new way of running things.

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.