Bright Ideas for Open/Social Engagement in Web-based Learning Communities

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Bright Ideas for Open/Social Engagement in Web-based Learning Communities

Research Club

The Public School

Brooklyn Brainery

OpenStudy

SuperCoolSchool

Unclasses.org

Alpha One Labs

Scratch from MIT

Metafilter

CourseKit

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There’s a lot of rad open/social learning opportunities on the web and on the Earth right now. P2PU is one of them, but our current technical platform and user experience seem to fail in comparison. As we’re building a new platform, I hope we can take some inspiration from the platforms of others. Here’s a short-list of things we see and like in these other organizations. Please add your inspirations to this list - which is by no means an academic dissertation or critical technical review - it’s a very casual list of “awesome things”.

Research Club

When someone proposes a course with research club, they are initially asked about their leadership/facilitation level. Are you an expert? Are you just enthusiastic?  Do you know nothing and want to form a peer group? Is there something different about your approach? When participants come to sign up to a course, they’re told of the style and will know what to expect. There’s no guessing game.

The Public School

The Public School has the best course-status-layout ever! When I look at a course page I automatically know what stage it’s in, I can leave comments at any stage in meaningful way and I can express my interest as a participant or take more initiative by saying “I can teach this”. It has all the good sharable links, too. Awesome! ..Wouldn’t it be so cool if P2PU did the same thing? For example if the course were still in proposed/draft status I could say “I’m interested” or “I can help design this”. When it’s running I can offer to join the leadership or lead another iteration. Awesome!

Brooklyn Brainery

The Brooklyn Brainery is a smaller real-life operation, but they do something pretty rad - course wrap-ups on their main blog! It would be great for P2PU to automate some sort of wrap-up function for courses that automatically get submitted to the showcase. It’s easier for the Brainery to have an “end” to courses because their participants meet in real life and then go home. Still, we should take a nod from this clever exposition of peer-production.

OpenStudy

OpenStudy is way ahead of us with respect to study groups. While it’s a little terrifying how awesome they are, I don’t think OpenStudy poses any direct threat/competition to our model as they have a very specific niche and our community building goals are much broader and personal than theirs. Still, the idea of study groups makes way more sense since we’ve seen a maximum level of ideal engagement for peer groups of about 2-3 weeks. I’m totally inspired by the idea of minimum engagement expectations and allowing growth to those that will continue to contribute by default (organically). Forcing participation through coercion and sign-up tasks is totally backwards (inorganic, time-consuming and unsuccessful). Also, OpenStudy uses the hell out of etherpad. Awesome! (All OpenStudy user contributions in study groups is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.)

SuperCoolSchool

Right when I sign-up, SuperCoolSchool prompts me to engage multi-laterally. I think this is an excellent first step in letting users know their possibilities and powers. Currently P2PU users have no way to network with others and they don’t know any of the amazing possibilities that await them.


The class breakdown of requested, upcoming and recorded is also really helpful.  Here is another school started using SuperCool Schools - a group that calls themselves the “Startup School” which has “2100 entrepreneurs from 130 different countries... a wide variety of entrepreneurs, investors and experts around us. Famous entrepreneurs like Brad Feld (Founder of Foundry Group), Marc Benioff (Founder of Salesforce), Mike Maples (Investor @ Floodgate), Bill Liao (Founder of Xing), Jason Fried (37 Signals) and many more donated their time to fill this school with more than 200 hours of recorded live classes.”

Unclasses.org

Unclasses.org doesn’t necessarily follow through with it’s classes. It’s more of a suggest-a-course metropolis, but at least they have good categorization on the front page. P2PU currently only categorizes things under schools and leaves all other courses with the vague stigma of general. We owe it to visitors to help them find what they’re looking for.

Alpha One Labs

http://www.alphaonelabs.com/

Scratch from MIT

http://scratch.mit.edu/
The good people of Lifelong Kindergarten figured out a rather seamless integration between web-hosted apps and downloaded authoring environment. Here are the elements of it.

On the site, you can download any object and embed it into your blog or site. Remixing “genomes” are tracked automatically, and people do follow those who remix their work and form groups this way.

In the authoring environment, the uploading to the site is easy.

And here is the result - 1.6 million applets uploaded in two years since it started.

Metafilter

Metafilter.com, an awesome collaborative/crowd-sourced weblog, is really serious about people's intentions and how their community is run. They express this explicitly before you can sign up:



Class User Experience

CourseKit

not that i think the new P2PU site is to far off from this however the coursekit course page design is one that manages to consolidate all course material and data into one place well.
If perhaps we could take the existing course pages that organizers create and throw them into a tabbed system alongside pre-defined tabs of “overview” and “syllabus”.