More on the Peer-to-Peer University

A follow-up to my earlier note on the P2PU.  Their broadcast email reports quite a success for the first attempt:

227 people completed the sign-up form for our 7 pilot courses. A little more than half are based in the US, but we have had sign-ups from 35 different countries.

Not bad at all. 
The icing on the cake?  This one:

The first P2PU student managed to get official credit. Tom Caswell writes: "I am a lifelong learner, but I am also a full-time PhD student at Utah State University. (BTW, I was able to get independent study credit for this course through USU.)". And participants in the land restoration course are taking the course as part of their formal studies.

Good going :-)

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?

Peer to Peer University

If Second Life and World of Warcraft are the beginnings of a future, where an increasing part of daily lives will be spent in a virtual world, restricting teaching and learning only the real world will become increasingly difficult. Yesterday, in one of my real world classes, one student said during discussions: "let me be honest. I am only here because I know that I will need a four-year degree to move up. I find it frustrating that this [he was referring to university education] is the only business where the consumer has no choice at all."

Of course, learning as a "consumer" behavior, as if it is like buying a soy milk latte, does not appeal to me. But, hey, that is the reality we are dealing with, and in the immortal words of a rather hopeless mortal, we can go to war only with the military we have :-(

So, on top of everything else, we can expect more and more of a demand for online learning. Politicians, who are already sold on the business/consumer model, will prefer this even more because then there will be less pressure for constructing new buildings, ....

Have I set the context up enough? Well, the Chronicle of Hr. Ed. has a report on yet another model for online teaching and learning: the Peer to Peer University. According to the Chronicle:

The organizers call it P2P University (for peer-to-peer), and they hope to fill what they see as a gap in online-education efforts by traditional colleges, which often focus more on delivering full degree programs online than on one-off courses. ....
P2P University's two main audiences will be working professionals who want to brush up on a topic for their jobs but don't have time to take a whole degree program, and recent retirees who have plenty of time on their hands and feel comfortable in cyberspace ....
Although the university will not grant credit or seek accreditation of any kind, it will encourage students to seek college credit elsewhere — either by asking a traditional institution to give independent-study credit or by directing students to Western Governors University or other institutions that grant credit to students who can prove they have learned certain material on their own. P2P University might issue some kind of certificate indicating who taught the course and what was learned, however, and in some cases that alone might be enough for students to show a boss or put on their CV