Interviews collected by A. Cole

BUILDING IDEAS THROUGH DESIGN | Vivek Rao

 

How did you find open resources? Google or something else?
There's a fair amount of freely available journal articles and magazine articles from the likes of BusinessWeek and Wired floating around that really make the case. But yeah, I used Google to track these particular articles down and if necessary a university Lexis-Nexis subscription to get ahold of pdf's.  

Not enough. I had an idealized vision of the course being purely collaborative and largely driven by discussions and project work, but this ended up being unsustainable. The reality of last round's course was that the majority of the work will be the student's prerogative, and just by virtue of remote connectivity and timezones and whatnot, relying more than 50% on live discussion is very difficult. More on this later. So, yeah, not enough.

Did your members participate in/complete a project?
The goal was of course to have a project; this never made progress.

Did members work as groups or individually?
There was individual reading and couple of discussion board assignments. The project work, which we didn't get to, would have been intensively team based.

Did you have attrition? Besides technology problems, were there any contributing factors to drop-out rates?
Yup. A couple of people just stopped showing up and actually didn't respond to a personal message; I didn't have the personal bandwidth to chase after unreliable students so I don't know exactly why. I do know that we were on live calls on a roughly once-in-ten-days cycle which probably felt glacial for my students. So, my slow scheduling was one big reason - the tempo got kicked up eaerly and wasn't sustained.

What aspects of your course did participants find exciting?
Definitely the collaborative calls. A great way to get pumped up, especially our initial meet n' greet n' intro call, which had everybody really stoked to be in the class (this made it doubly hard when things fell apart). I really believe all students found the course content very interesting, and the subject of design thinking has great potential for impact as a P2PU course.

What did they find boring?
Articles never got traction, and I think explanations of material over Skype were a bit of a drag. Meaning, giving a complete response to student questions on live calls often took a large amount of time, which I imagine is a total bore and an invitation to zone out.

How did your group communicate?
Once every 10 day calls; personal messages and emails; some disussion board action.

Did you ever feel overwhelmed by your own course?
YES! I love this question. I think courses for P2PU need to have a laserlike focus if they have any hope of seeing meaningful completion within 42 days. I mean, imagine if you're NOT meeting once or twice a week, it's almost impossible to make worthwhile things happen with the course. Add our infrequent meetings to the ambitiously broad goals of the course, and this is a recipe for what should never happen to a course organizer: fearing my course! Fear, because I was so overwhelmed.

If you had to pass on one piece of advice, what would it be?
I'm so old and wizened (and unfocused?) I have a couple:
1) Be a laser. Focus. Think about what's realistically achievable in 40 days and aim for that.
2) Frame your course exploration in terms of things that can be learned independently, hopefully easily so.
3) Depend on discussions and conferences more as emotional boosters and clarification sessions, rather than vehicles to move content.
3) Be a banshee, haunt that message board, and shout to your class as much as you can. You should be all over communication as that's all you've got.

 

MASHING UP THE OPEN WEB | John Britton

 

What is your go-to search engine for open resources?
I don't really use a search engine for open resources, I just used Google and asked around the community.
 

 

In your course, did you provide too much content or not enough?
I tried to cover too much material for the amount of time available. There should have been a smaller focus and more materials available for each topic.

 

Did your members participate-in/complete a project?
Yes, all participants worked on projects. Two fully completed the projects while the others made progress but did not reach their final goal.

Did members work as groups or individually?
Projects were individual, however we did pair off more experienced participants with the less experienced participants to be mentors.

Did you have attrition?

{no answer} 

 

Besides technology problems, were there any contributing factors to drop-out rates?
For the most part, no. Approximately 30 people signed up for the course, of which around 15 were able to take part in the synchronous meetings. Of the 15 that were able to make the meetings, the same core of about 8 returned to each class session.

What aspects of your course did participants find exciting?
The project and live video discussions.

What did they find boring?
Reading technology manuals, although the reading was assigned, almost none of the participants completed it. They did however read the more interesting reading assignments such as "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

 

How did your group communicate?
Weekly video discussions and announcements in the course group. IRC was also used occasionally.

Did you ever feel overwhelmed by your own course? 
At first yes, but after the second week it was actually pretty easy.

If you had to pass on one piece of advice, what would it be?
Be asynchronous. Supply pre-recorded lectures or other material that the participants can consume on their own time. Use real-time communications for discussions, and make sure to value your participants time, it is in short supply.

 

CREATIVE NON-FICTION | Jane Park

 

How did you find open resources? Google or something else? In your course, did you provide too much content or not enough?

Google and DiscoverEd (http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/),
a search prototype from Creative Commons that specifically searches
educational resources and shows metadata like CC license used. I also
used the OCW Consortium course finder:
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/courses/search. I probably went through a
few other cumulative sites, but I don't remember the details now.

In this phase, I provided less content and focused more on the
writing--learning from last phase that there was just too much work in
too short of a time span. That said, I think I could have provided a
bit more content, by way of exploring methods of writing creative
nonfiction. However, this is difficult as the creative nonfiction
writing pieces I admired were not open online, so I instead had the
peers each recommend a writing piece that was available online. I also
focused my course more on the individual submissions, because it is
such a short course and most of the value one gets out of a peer
driven course is to gain feedback from the peers.

Did your members participate in/complete a project? Did members work as groups or individually?

 

No, not in the sense of a traditional project. And the length of the

course wasn't conducive to developing a complete story--everyone had

the beginnings of one (about two chapters). Members worked

individually, but gave each other open feedback.

Did you have attrition? Besides technology problems, were there any contributing factors to drop-out rates?

Yes. About 50%, like last time. I think just the distance, different

timezones and the difficulty of scheduling consecutive synchronous

sessions because of that. I think in a course regularity is sort of

key in keeping motivation. Also that people were all older with full

time lives/jobs. But some of the attrition was one-off and valid, just

like last time. For instance, this one woman writing about the

Israel/Palestine conflict had to drop because she was injured by

shrapnel ironically because of that conflict.

What aspects of your course did participants find exciting? What did they find boring?

Hm. I think they found talking about their conflicts and researching

them exciting. I don't know what they found boring... nothing! The

entirety of the course was interesting! ;)

 

How did your group communicate?

Website mail, comments, occasional Skype, Skype chat, and emails.

 

Did you ever feel overwhelmed by your own course?

Not this time around... but to be honest, I also was not as invested.
I was trying to really play the role of facilitator rather than
instructor... I think I could have been more invested, and I think I
will only volunteer to run a course again when I feel more invested.

If you had to pass on one piece of advice, what would it be?

 

If you are new to running a course online, prepare yourself in any way
you can---such as taking the course organizer's course! Or perhaps,
just taking another P2PU course to see what it's like from the other
end. I plan to do that. That way you can better deal with peers'
frustrations.

I think one of the keys to being a good course organizer is regular,
consistent communication. Sometimes I would only communicate twice a
week via reminder emails (aside from web comments and all that), but I
think setting up a schedule on your google calendar is a good idea.
For example, every mon, wed, and fri I will email and make it a point
to comment on site or have some other communication with the peers.
Also, consistent (and not sporadic) organization is important. You
have to be organized and constant in assigning tasks, deadlines,
discussions... because they certainly aren't going to organize
themselves!