P2PU Supported Learning and Communication Tools

P2PU.org has created a community learning environment (your course page) that includes basic tools for communication and collaboration. The P2PU (drupal) platform provides forums and chat. We have a separate wiki and can also aid organizers with blogging on wordpress.

For additional tools that you can use within your collaborative learning, please read through the Community Toolbox.

Forums

FORUMS support asynchronous, many-to-many discussion amongst participants. Typically someone posts a forum topic and the group responds through comments or replies.

Learning objectives include:

• Express clear, coherent thoughts and arguments in writing
• Debate and discuss issues in the field topic
• Analyze and critique (scholarly) work/discipline
• Create community 
• Connect course topics with current events, personal experience or concepts across courses

☞ Does this tool fit the course's learning objectives? Visit Learning Objectives Alignment

Benefits of forums:

• Built-in to P2PU.org
• 24/7 availability, meaning that discussions can carry on beyond time-zone constraints or scheduling issues
• Helps create community by a continuous flow of discussion  
• Facilitates discussion on issues or concepts that can foster deeper connections or understanding 

Limitations:

• No assurance of response from participants, facilitator must stay engaged in forum
• Due to the asynchronous nature, requires continued motivation to participate
• Some responses can be lengthy and make catching up difficult

Forums are built into each course page on p2pu.org. This feature is a familiar, easy to use tool. Most organizers have found forums are the best tools for discussion in courses. We recommend that organizers use a forum in conjunction with any other tools, as it allows the group to interact asynchronously, keeping everyone in the loop and building more robust conversations.

Chat

CHAT is a lightweight synchronous form of communication through short text messages.

Learning objectives include:

• Create community
• Ask question / get assistance
• Debate and discuss issues in the field topic

☞ Does this tool fit the course's learning objectives? Visit Learning Objectives Alignment

Benefits of chat:

• Built-in to P2PU.org 
• Synchronous engagement of participants
• Easiest form of communication for low-bandwidth participants
• Lowers the disadvantage level of those participating in a second language 
• Excellent for office hours

Limitations: 

• Overlapping, often many conversations going on at once, therefore challenging to facilitate and follow
• May lead to expectation that the organizer is always available for questions, so guidelines should be set in advance. 

Chat is another embedded feature in p2pu.org course pages. It is a familiar and easy to use method of synchronous communication. Many organizers have used it for "office hours", although if you choose to do so, we recommend that you set designated time slots and communicate them upfront to avoid an expectation that you will always be available and lead to extra burden on you. 

WIKI

WIKI is a collaborative space which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. For example, you are participating in the orientation, and our participatory platform is this wiki!

Learning objectives include:

• Collaboratively write or build documents
• Share work / learn by social example
• Synthesize various perspectives about a topic or concept
• Create community
• Take responsibility for learning / teach others

☞ Does this tool fit the course's learning objectives? Visit Learning Objectives Alignment

Benefits of wikis:

• P2PU has an existing wiki (wiki.p2pu.org)
• Serve as a knowledge platform where participants can share their knowledge with the group, put up interesting pieces of information, work together, discuss issues, etc. 
• Facilitate collaborative document building, great for group projects 
• Keeps course materials, assignments & happenings all in one central, editable location. 

Limitations:

• Requires a certain level of computer skills
• Requires some curation to ensure pages are linked and easy to find 
• Completely open wikis are vulnerable to inaccuracy, poor revisions, and vandalism because anyone can edit.
• Attribution and original ownership can get lost amongst a large group of collaborators and editors.

Our wiki is not embedded within a course page on p2pu.org. Rather, you must navigate to 'wiki.p2pu.org'. If you choose a wiki as your main participation tool, make sure to have clear links to and from your course page on p2pu.org. We recommend using the forum and chat features on your main course page in addition to the wiki.

BLOGS

BLOGS are personal web-logs that support opinions, ideas, and news. Blogs are a platform that give voice to a person's or groups intentions on the web.

Learning objectives include:

• Express clear, coherent thoughts and arguments in writing
• Connect course topics with current events, personal experience or concepts across courses
• Synthesize various perspectives about the topic or concept
• Reflect on learning, metacognition

☞ Does this tool fit the course's learning objectives? Visit Learning Objectives Alignment

Benefits of blogs:

• Helps course members develop their own unique voice, encourage them to formulate opinions and thoughts
• Gives course members more time to reflect and develop an understanding and think critically about the topic
• Provides opportunities to express and experience different opinions and perspectives among the group. 
• Provides greater context to course material.

Limitations:

• If the blog is available publicly, this could intimidate some members from participating
• Requires continued activity and community involvement to write new posts and read/comment on other's posts
• Necessitates some form of aggregating to pull everyone's posts into one place.  

P2PU does not have blogs embedded in p2pu.org. If you decide that blogs are the best mode of participation, participants will need to use an external blog and link to it within the course.  To do so, we recommend the following process:

1. New bloggers can create their own blog on Wordpress.com. Participants willing to use their existing blogs may do so. 
2. All participants link to their blogs (new or existing) in the course. 
3. If you're feeling savvy, you can work with the community to set up an RSS feed for your course.

Virtual Meeting Space / Classroom

Big Blue Button is an open source classroom environment.

P2PU has begun to use Big Blue Button as a collaborative meeting space and classroom. The benefits it offers the community include:

• many concurrent users
• text chat
• voice (that can be controlled by the organizer, muted/unmuted etc) 
• video (by one or by several)
• screen sharing
• presentation sharing

For more information on how to use Big Blue Button, please read this documentation

The information above describing the learning objectives, benefits & limitations of blogs, forums, chat, wikis and social bookmarking in online courses has been mainly contributed by Nathan Gandomi & Erin Knight at the UC Berkeley iSchool.

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