Q: I know that SoSI study groups can have combine both local (face-to-face) and global (online) components, but how exactly do the two work together?

A: We are experimenting with every new SoSI topic we form, but we have a few things you can try, based our experience so far.  In general we believe that social innovation skills like cooperation, teamwork, and empathy are learned better in-person than online, but SoSI study groups can be either totally online, totally offline, or combine many offline groups together with some online collaboration depending on their goals.

We call local, in-person SoSI study groups "citizen circles"– small, offline peer groups who meet locally to conduct the courses and focus on transforming their communities and themselves.  These local groups can create their own study groups or connect and share with many other local groups as part of larger topics in SoSI.

See the section of the Handbook on organizing offline groups to learn more.

Q: Does the course organizer review all participants' work, or is this all done in the small groups?

All members of a study group play a role in the study group.  We like to emphasize that students have a way to share and celebrate successes in a way that demonstrates their growth over time in certain competencies, particularly "deeper" ones like empathy, creativity, and cooperation, and that participants "peer review" each other's work.  In general, we do not think it would not be common or preferable for someone to take on the role of "grading" other members of a study group, unless there is a reason for this that all of the participants of that course helped envision and ask for together.   We believe there could also be space for experimenting with outside evaluations of work from experienced third-parties if that adds to your objectives, but have not yet used such a strategy.

We are experimenting with several different ways for participants to share and celebrate their successes, including asking participants to produce portfolios (e.g. the Social Innovation in Education participants produced "Living Transcripts" - retrospective portfolios cataloguing their strengths as social innovators over the course of their lives) or holding a studio show to get peer feedback on the work of participants from an outside perspective.

We have also participated in piloting "badges" with the P2PU School of Webcraft.  Badges are essentially digital certificates that can be put anywhere on the web that can be traced for authenticity back to peers or trusted reviewers who recognized that you have exhibited competence or mastery in certain strengths or skills.  For your citizen circle, you may want to create a process by which participants can complete specific challenges students could complete in order to earn specific badges (plus a rubric outlining what counts and doesn't count), or you could retroactively award badges based on nominations and peer voting at the end of a course.  You could also ask outside organizations to suggest challenges students may want to take on, in which case the validation a participant receives from that organization and their peers upon successfully completing a challenge would go a long way towards validating that participants' accomplishments.

Q: The class I want to sign up for on SoSI is full, can I still sign up for an oversubscribed class?

A: This is up to each study group, but, as mentioned above, we are open to experimenting with large, distributed classes, so you may want to ask anyway.  The first person to create a study group should make it clear in the description of their group how many people they would like to see join and whether there are any "hard" limits.  We want to keep the emphasis on keeping groups small enough that everyone can know everyone else, but there may be many groups related to any given topic.