Peer-to-peer U. open for business

Back in October, I blogged about a fantastically creative initiative: the peer-to-peer university.
I had also registered at that site, and a couple of days ago I got an email from them:

Last week at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, we launched the Peer 2 Peer University pilot phase and opened sign-up to our first set of free and open online
courses:

* Behavioral Economics and Decision Making (Neeru Paharia)
* Copyright for Educators (Andrew Rens, Hauwa Otori)
* Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature (Bekka Kahn)
* Land Restoration and Afforestation (Alison Cole, SongAnh Nguyen)
* Neuroethics and International Biolaw (Ana Rosa Tenório de Amorim)
* Open Creative Nonfiction Writing (Jane Park)
* Poker and Strategic Thinking (Niels Sprong)

Please have a look at our new site (http://www.p2pu.org), consider joining one of the courses, and help us spread the word. We are looking for our first batch of self-learners. Sign-up closes on 26 August 2009!

The Chronicle has a brief report on this, and includes this:

Courses are free, but prospective students do have to fill out a brief application and be accepted to participate, and courses will be capped at about a dozen per course section. "We are not applying the typical selection criteria of course, but are just interested to see that people give good reasons why they want to join a course," said Jan Philipp Schmidt, free-courseware project manager at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, and a leader of P2P University. "We want to make sure that participants are truly committed and won't drop out after they realize that it actually takes a few hours of work every week."

Organizers plan to see how things go this semester and will probably revamp the model for its next term, said Joel Thierstein, one of the leaders of the effort, who is also executive director of Rice University's Connexions project, a free online collection of scholarly materials. "We're trying to keep our minds open," he said. "Success will probably come in a form that we're surprised by."

The project is supported by a $70,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Registration for the new university's courses closes August 26.

I hope this succeeds. We need such experiments to be successful in order to transform how we currently put into practice the idea of "education" and "higher education".
BTW, if you decide to test-drive this, will you please update me?