What Type of Course Can I Run at School of Webcraft?
Courses and content offered by the School of Webcraft focus exclusively on open standards-based web development. As an example: courses on HTML5 are in scope, courses on Flash are not. If you are unsure whether the course you'd like to organise is suitable for School of Webcraft, please ask on the Webcraft mailing list.
For more information on why we're running the School of Webcraft and what we mean by open, standards-based web development please review our draft Charter for the Webcraft project.
If your course is about general technology or non-open web development we suggest that you run your course within the general P2PU course structure.
Courses should allow participants to develop their skills and knowledge with relevant project based work that they can present to employers and peers in a portfolio.
Suggested Course Materials
All resources used in P2PU courses including those run by School of Webcraft must be freely available. It's makes us even happier if they are openly licensed.
WaSP Interact
The WaSP Interact courses have been developed by the community of the Web Standards Project. These openly licensed course materials have been developed with a formal university audience in mind, but provide a strong foundation for peer-run courses about open, standards based development. To see an overview of available courses please view their framework curriculum.
http://interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/framework/
Free Technology Academy
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is organised by a consortium of European universities producing Masters level courseware about free software, open standards, software development and network technologies. Unless otherwise stated, all FTA content is licensed openly under a CC BY-SA 3.0 License.
http://ftacademy.org
Computer Science for Everyone
Parah Shah a Webcraft community member is collecting video lectures about computer science and web development topics. Topics he's found lectures for include JavaScript and Internet and Networking Technologies.
http://www.diycomputerscience.com/
Dive into HTML5
Mark Pilgrim has written an openly licensed book about getting started with HTML5. Community members have recommended it be used as the basis for HTML5 courses.
http://diveintohtml5.org/
Interaction-Design.org
Interaction Design offers an encyclopedia and assorted learning materials related to interaction design and user experience. All content on the site is usually covered by a default Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs Licence.
http://www.interaction-design.org
Do you know of any other free and open courseware about open, standards based web development that we should recommend? Please suggest your resources here.
Can I propose assessments that relate to my course?
If you think that your participants would benefit from working towards assessments, you can work with us to design appropriate criteria for them to work towards.
An overview of the Assessment and Badging project for School of Webcraft provides more information on what's happening.
How do I select the right participants for my course?
All P2PU courses are based on the principle of allowing small social groups to learn together. The School of Webcraft (SoW) is gaining tremendous popularity, and often SoW courses can have hundreds of applications. It's important to note that anyone can follow a course just by visiting the website. Participation in a course is the next level of engagement and requires an actual commitment. Creation of a thorough sign-up task for your course application is the best way to select participants most likely to commit.
Additionally, the application sign up task helps you determine which applicants have suitable prerequisite knowledge, motivation and an understanding of how the collaborative nature of peer learning works. All of these qualities are important for a positive peer learning experience.
The technical tasks that you set need going to be relevant to the topic and prerequisites of your course. For specific advice on what type of tasks to set we suggest that you ask the School of Webcraft community via the p2pu-webcraft discussion list.
Managing Sign-Ups
I hope that you're all looking forward to your upcoming courses for School of Webcraft at P2PU! Some courses have already been opened for application and many of you will have your courses moved from Draft status and set to Open in the coming days, with announcements being sent to mailing lists from this Wednesday, January 12th.
As I'm sure you're aware, there's been a huge amount of interest in School of Webcraft following great press coverage just before the Christmas and the New Year. To put it simply, we gained more than 6000 subscribers to our mailing lists in over a week. We're very excited to have so many new followers who are interested in learning within our community, now we just need to work out how to communicate most effectively with them all. :-)
One of the problems with having so many people eager to participate is that there's going to be a huge amount of sign-ups which fall on you, the course organisers to process. Unfortunately this can be a time consuming and thankless task as you will inevitably have to deny people the opportunity to participate in your course. We do have some suggestions about how to make the process easier.
Have a Strong Sign-Up Task
If your course is still in draft mode, please make sure you have read through this blog post and review your sign-up task. Sign-up tasks should provide you with criteria to measure course applications against and help you determine which applicants are motivated and skilled enough to be rewarding course participants.
Sign-ups end January 19th.
We'll be announcing that sign-ups end January 19th. This will give applicants a week to complete their task and provides at least a week for you to review applications and respond to both successful and unsuccessful applicants. If you choose to have sign-ups end on another day please make this very clear on your course page.
Make Final Acceptance Decisions After Sign-Ups Close
In order to give all applications a fair consideration, please don't make final decisions on successful applications until after January 19th. You can review sign-up tasks and begin to make a short-list of people you think would be good participants as applications come in. If sign-up tasks have not been completed you may wish to deny those applicants straight away.
Set Aside Time To Review Sign-Ups
Try to set aside several hours for processing applications and reviewing sign-up tasks. I suggest having some tea or coffee to hand and some scrap paper to make notes on.
Offer Places to Your Preferred Applicants
When you've decided on the participants you'd like to have in your course please accept their Applications. We suggest that you forward them your completed course description and schedule and offer them an opportunity to drop-out from the course after acceptance. Some people may not be able to commit to the final workload or may have received offers of joining other courses.
Many participants will drop-out, if you feel confident enough this may encourage you to start your course with a larger group than you originally planned.
Please Communicate Acceptance or Denial to all Applicants
Once you've made your final decisions, please send messages to all unsuccessful applicants. We'll provide you with information you can forward them about how they can "audit" your course by accessing and following your course content.
Scaling Your Course - Ideas for how to do this
This is the first round of courses where there's been a major need to scale course places. As this will be our first proper attempt at scaling course numbers this will be an experiment, so please share any suggestions you may have.
If you don't feel comfortable attempting to scale your course, that is totally fine. Please accept only the number of participants that you feel comfortable facilitating!
For the record, I tried to scale a course last round by just creating a separate "community" course for all the extra people, there was no extra facilitation provided, no orientation meeting, no synchronous meetups. This impromptu approach did not work. :-)
What Scaled Courses Need
In order for scaled courses to work we need to maintain small class sizes, provide facilitators for each small group and setup ways for these groups to communicate with each other and discover and share new skills together.
Matt Buscemi and I have roughly discussed this approach which is inspired in part by the Copyright for Educators setup and from online courses I've participated in. We'd appreciate any help refining the process. This approach relies on using the P2PU course system as the primary communication tool.
I'll use Matt and his course as an example when explaining this.
Matt's Increasingly Large Course Problem and What He Plans To Do
Matt's running the Introduction to PHP course.
Matt initially defined 20 places for his course, but within 3 days of opening for sign-ups his course has already received over 100 applications - most of whom have satisfactorily completed their sign-up task and deserve a place. He's expecting that he'll receive many more applications before the sign-ups close. Like everyone else in P2PU and School of Webcraft, Matt believes in the benefits of collaborative learning and he doesn't want to disappoint any of his applicants. He's feeling a little overwhelmed.
Matt wants to scale his course and wants to maintain the participatory learning environment that P2PU offers. He's going to need to ask for help.
Matt Asks For Help
Matt is going to ask for assistance from both members of the School of Webcraft discussion list, and from the people who have applied for his course. Matt's call to the Webcraft list is a pretty general request for assistance:
"Hi Webcrafters,
my Intro to PHP course is getting overrun with applicants and they all deserve a place - is anyone on the list interested in helping me facilitate the course? We'll all be responsible for looking after small groups of learners. If you're comfortable working with PHP that would be great, but as long as you can complete the sign-up task I'm happy for your assistance!
Let me know if you can help!"
His message to the course's applicants is a little different. Matt sends this message using the Broadcast tool on P2PU.org as anyone who has not had their application denied is able to receive messages via this tool.
Subject: "Course is full, I need your help to let more people participate!"
"Hi applicants,
I'm really excited to receive all your applications, but there's a problem - I can only teach 20 of you without help. I'd love to offer places to more of you, but in order to do that I'll need a new facilitator for every 15 extra participants. Facilitating courses on P2PU and School of Webcraft is a great volunteer experience and you'll develop a lot of new skills such as working with teams, online moderation and coordinating discussions. Are any of you willing to assist me?
Helping facilitate on this course will mean taking on a more active role and setting aside more time than normal course participant, but you'll probably end up learning more. We'll need to meet at the beginning of each week to discuss our strategy for the week and to ask questions about the readings and the tasks that are set for the week. I will also ask for your help reviewing applications, managing and moderating forums within the course and helping lead group discussions on calls or in chat. Are you interested?
Please contact me via my profile on the P2PU site if you can help out."
Presuming That You Get Facilitators / What You Should Do Next
Where can I get more help?
The P2PU Course Design Handbook is the best place. You can also participate in the Course Design Orientation which provides seminars with previous organizers and course design experts. If you're fond of OSQA systems, you are welcome to bring general questions to the larger community on http://qa.p2pu.org.
If would like feedback about the technological and web development aspects of a course please ask on the School of Webcraft community mailing list.
☜Return to Course Design Handbook Overview
Comments (2)
mvolz said
at 7:30 pm on Jan 13, 2011
If we are expected to individually contact each applicant we reject, would it be possible for a list of rejected applicants to be available on the admin page?
ALISON COLE said
at 7:24 pm on Jan 14, 2011
The p2pu-dev at googlegroups dot com list is the best place to ask this question.
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