A community learning environment like P2PU breaks a lot of social norms assumed in traditional educational environments. At P2PU there are no strict roles of teachers and students. Rather everyone is responsible for their own learning and must work together to achieve it. All participants, including the organizer, are allowed to take more ownership of their education with P2PU, and with that comes a new set of norms and expectations.

During course design, you are responsible for:

• Gathering open resources
• Structuring a syllabus
• Choosing best media formats (forum, chat, wiki, blog, etc.)
• Designing the course for openness & posterity so it can be passed it on
• Making sure your course is truly ready to run (http://wiki.p2pu.org/course-checklist)

When facilitating/organizing a course, you are responsible for:

• Initiating discussion around introductions, and social contracts/expectations
• Scheduling & hosting meetings
• Responding to contributions and keeping participants on task
• Keeping up morale and mediating conflict

Excellent examples: Read about the experiences of previous P2PU facilitators here: http://www.k12opened.com/blog/archives/468 and here: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/07/28/thoughts-on-our.html

While participating, everyone in the course is responsible for:

• Setting an agreement with other participants about expectations and norms (a social contract)
• Identifying personal learning goals
• Participating in course meetings
• Responding to discussions and assignments in a timely manner
• Recommending additional resources for the course
• Reflecting on your participation and recommending improvements when the course ends

(You can certainly share these responsibilities with your course members during community building)

☜Return to Course Design Handbook