Peer to Peer University

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Peer 2 Peer University
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Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is a nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. Peer 2 Peer University was started in 2009 with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation, with its first of courses in September of that year. An example of the "edupunk" approach to education, P2PU charges no tuition and courses are not accredited. [1] However, some courses in "The School of Webcraft" provide the opportunity for recognition of achievements through the Open Badges project. [2]

Hewlett Foundation foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation awards grants to a variety of liberal and progressive causes, as well as conservative organizations.

The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of the foundation, its structure and how it invests in social innovation, the current model employs a fellowship model where fellows are given funding commensurate with their experience to match a year's salary, allowing them to spend that year developing a particular idea.

Edupunk

Edupunk is a do it yourself (DIY) attitude to teaching and learning practices. Tom Kuntz described edupunk as "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of ’70s bands like The Clash to the classroom." Many instructional applications can be described as DIY education or edupunk.

Contents

P2PU offers some of the features of massive open online courses (MOOCs), but is focused on people sharing their knowledge on a topic or learning about a topic offered by another user with a DIY wiki-type mentality. [3] Unlike typical massive open online courses, anyone can create a course as well as take one. [4] Additionally, because of its less hierarchical nature, P2PU activities need not necessarily be Courses; the admin of the learning environment can select from Study Group and Challenge as well as creating their own term.

Massive open online course education service on the web

A massive open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive courses with user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs), as well as immediate feedback to quick quizzes and assignments. MOOCs are a recent and widely researched development in distance education, first introduced in 2006 and emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012.

Academic profile

P2PU's peer to peer philosophy is meant to put a "social and pedagogical wrapper" around open access and educational materials. There is some evidence to suggest that greater social participation in P2PU may lead to more invested learning than other online education. [5] For instance, in an early P2PU course on cyberpunk literature, research noted "a shift from the subject-authority pattern of relations generally associated with teacher-led education to the agential pattern of relations associated with peer-led education." [6] Class participants communicate live through technologies such as Skype and IRC as well as asynchronously through the P2PU website, allowing geographically dispersed classmates to have discussions. [7] P2PU is organized into Schools which include:

Open educational resources educational materials that can be freely used and reused

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. There is no universal usage of open file formats in OER.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.

Skype telecommunications software service

Skype is a telecommunications application that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet. Skype also provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit text, video, audio and images. Skype allows video conference calls.

Mozilla Free and open-source software community, developer of Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, benefiting both copyright owners and licensees.

Pedagogy Theory and practice of education

Pedagogy refers more broadly to the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practise of pedagogy varies greatly, as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.

P2PU's school of Webcraft courses were early adopters of a badge reward system, [8] and with their task completion system there are elements of gamification and gamification of learning.

Mozilla Open Badges

Open Badges is the name of a group of specifications and open technical standards originally developed by the Mozilla Foundation with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. The Open Badges standard describes a method for packaging information about accomplishments, embedding it into portable image files as a digital badge, and establishing an infrastructure for badge validation. The standard was originally maintained by the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group, but transitioned officially to the IMS Global Learning Consortium as of January 1, 2017.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It can also be defined as a set of activities and processes to solve problems by using or applying the characteristics of game elements. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. However, individual and contextual differences exist.

Gamification of learning

The gamification of learning is an educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video game design and game elements in learning environments. The goal is to maximize enjoyment and engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning. Gamification, broadly defined, is the process of defining the elements which comprise games that make those games fun and motivate players to continue playing, and using those same elements in a non-game context to influence behaviour. In other words, gamification is the introduction of game elements in a non-game situation.

Some of the courses that have been or are currently being offered include:

Infrastructure

The main learning management system for P2PU courses is called Lernanta (the Esperanto word for "learning"). It is written in Python using the Django web framework, and is developed and maintained by P2PU's community and staff. One P2PU study group, "Introduction to Contributing to Lernanta", is designed to help people become Lernanta contributors. [9] A fork of the Mozilla Foundation's Batacuda software that powers drumbeat.org, Lernanta is available under the Mozilla Public License, the GNU GPL, and the LGPL. [10] P2PU also hosts a wiki and an OSQA server for questions and answers.

A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. The learning management system concept emerged directly from e-Learning. Although the first LMS appeared in the higher education sector, the majority of the LMSs today focus on the corporate market. Learning Management Systems make up the largest segment of the learning system market. The first introduction of the LMS was in the late 1990s.

Esperanto constructed language

Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. It was created in the late 19th century by L. L. Zamenhof. In 1887 he published a book detailing the language, Unua Libro, under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto. Esperanto translates to English as "one who hopes".

Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python's design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its notable use of significant whitespace. Its language constructs and object-oriented approach aim to help programmers write clear, logical code for small and large-scale projects.

Projects

P2PU is hosting and coordinating the MOOC joint-venture Mechanical MOOC which is a blend of open online resources. The first Mechanical MOOC class will be “A Gentle Introduction to Python,” which is part M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, instant-feedback exercises and quizzes from Codecademy, and study groups organized by OpenStudy, while P2PU handles central communication such as email and discussion. [11] Mechanical MOOC is less tightly structured than traditional MOOC offerings that are backed by Universities, and offers no accreditation. Yet the initiators claim that this comes with an advantage they will capitalize on: if a student falls behind, they may repeat units at their own pace to catch up. [11]

History

The founding members of P2PU are Delia Browne, Neeru Paharia, Stian Haklev, Joel Thierstein and Philipp Schmidt. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with funding from The Hewlett Foundation, The Shuttleworth Foundation, and University of California Irvine. [12]

Schmidt explained in a video interview that P2PU came to be when he and his friends, later to become his co-founders, attempted to put the championed open educational resources to the test, and try to learn from them. They selected a topic they were unfamiliar with, Psychology, and set up weekly calls, to try to learn as a group with the materials. Schmidt says it was "incredibly hard," and "what's more important is the social aspect, that bond that forms between people, and the content is really just the beginning of the learning experience." [13]

Plans for P2PU were announced in October 2008. [14] The first set of courses was originally planned to begin in January 2009, but the official launch was delayed until September 2009. The project was initially supported by a $70,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. [15]

In September 2009, P2PU ran seven pilot courses with a total of 227 participants. [16] As of September 2011, P2PU claims "a community of about 1,000" and has over 50 courses open for sign-up. [12] [17]

Related Research Articles

Distance education or long-distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. A distance learning program can be completely distance learning, or a combination of distance learning and traditional classroom instruction. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms are used roughly synonymously with distance education.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.

Andrew Ng American artificial intelligence researcher

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a Chinese-American computer scientist and statistician, focusing on machine learning and AI. Also a business executive and investor in the Silicon Valley, Ng co-founded and led Google Brain and was a former Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

Udemy

Udemy.com is the world's largest online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults and students.

The Saylor Academy, formerly known as the Saylor Foundation, is a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was established in 1999 by its sole trustee, Michael J. Saylor. Since 2008, the focus of the foundation has been its Free Education Initiative which has led to the creation of 241 courses representing 10 of the highest enrollment majors in the US.

Digital learning is any type of learning that is accompanied by technology or by instructional practice that makes effective use of technology. It encompasses the application of a wide spectrum of practices including: blended and virtual learning.

Digital badges are a validated indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest that can be earned in various learning environments.

One of the most visible approaches to peer learning comes out of cognitive psychology, and is applied within a "mainstream" educational framework: "Peer learning is an educational practice in which students interact with other students to attain educational goals." In this context, it can be compared to the practices that go by the name cooperative learning. However, other contemporary views on peer learning relax the constraints, and position "peer-to-peer learning" as a mode of "learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything." Whether it takes place in a formal or informal learning context, in small groups or online, peer learning manifests aspects of self-organization that are mostly absent from pedagogical models of teaching and learning.

FutureLearn Massive open online course platform founded in 2012 as a company majority owned by the UKs Open University

FutureLearn is a digital education platform founded in December 2012. The company is wholly owned by The Open University in Milton Keynes, England. It is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) learning platform, and as of May 2018 included 143 UK and international partners, including non-university partners.

openSAP is an Enterprise MOOC platform for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. It is provided by SAP and hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Everyone can enroll in openSAP courses, which are provided free of charge.

Mike Feerick American businessman

Mike Feerick is an Irish-American social entrepreneur, and CEO & Founder of Alison an Ireland–based educational technology company. With 11 million registered learners, 1.5 million graduates, and 1,000 free courses as of December 2017, Alison is one of the world's largest players in online education – and one of the world's largest certifiers of educational and skills attainment. He is an Ashoka Fellow and cited as a pioneer in the modern online education industry. Paul Glader noted that Feerick is 'a key figure in the open-source learning world'. Alison has been identified by some as the first MOOC platform to be established, beginning in 2007, prior to the phrase been coined. Feerick is also the founder of Ireland Reaching Out, a "reverse" genealogy project based in Ireland that reconnects Irish diaspora with their ancestral roots in Ireland.

Shaw AcademyEducation is a privately owned online education organisation based in Dublin, Ireland.

Language MOOCs are web-based online courses freely accessible for a limited period of time, created for those interested in developing their skills in a foreign language. As Sokolik (2014) states, enrolment is large, free and not restricted to students by age or geographic location. They have to follow the format of a course, i.e., include a syllabus and schedule and offer the guidance of one or several instructors. The MOOCs are not so new, since courses with such characteristics had been available online for quite a lot of time before Dave Cormier coined the term 'MOOC' in 2008. Furthermore, MOOCs are generally regarded as the natural evolution of OERs, which are freely accessible materials used in Education for teaching, learning and assessment.

Online credentials for learning are digital credentials that are offered in place of traditional paper credentials for a skill or educational achievement. They are directly linked to the accelerated development of internet communication technologies, the development of digital badges, electronic passports and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

References

  1. ↑ Katie Hafner (16 April 2010). "An Open Mind". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
  2. ↑ Watters, Audrey (8 September 2011). "Master a new skill? Here's your badge". O'Reilly Radar. Retrieved 15 January 2013.
  3. ↑ Hafner, Katie (April 16, 2010). "An open mind". New York Times. Retrieved 30 October 2012.
  4. ↑ Brazil, Jeff. "P2PU: Learning for Everyone, by Everyone, about almost Anything". DMLCentral. Retrieved 25 October 2012.
  5. ↑ Panagiota, Alevizou. "Distributed mentoring: peer interaction and collaborative learning in P2PU" (PDF). Open ED 2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2–4 November 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Retrieved 30 October 2012.
  6. ↑ Ponti, Marisa (January 2011). "Socio-Technical Relations in the Creation of an Interest-Driven Open Course". Symposium Journals. 8 (4): 408–422.
  7. ↑ Sreevatsan, Ajai (10 July 2010). "P2PU organises learning outside institutional walls". The Hindu. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  8. ↑ Esienberg, Anne (Nov 22, 2011). "Now, digital badges for job hunters". Standford Business. Archived from the original on November 23, 2011. Retrieved 30 October 2012.
  9. ↑ "Contributing to Lernanta". P2PU. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  10. ↑ "LICENSE.txt". Lernata. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  11. 1 2 Lewin, Tamar. "Free Online Course Will Rely on Multiple Sites". New York Times. Retrieved 14 November 2012.
  12. 1 2 "Org". About Page. Retrieved 14 November 2012.
  13. ↑ DML Research Hub (2011). P2PU: Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything (http) (Flash). Vimeo. Retrieved 2012-11-14.
  14. ↑ YOUNG, JEFFREY R. (24 October 2008). "Proponents of Online Education Plan to Start Peer-to-Peer University". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  15. ↑ YOUNG, JEFFREY R. (19 August 2009). "P2P U., an Experiment in Free Online Education, Opens for Business". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  16. ↑ "Update on P2PU – We are on our way". P2PU Blog. 1 September 2009. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  17. ↑ http://p2pu.org/en/groups/ Accessed 15 January 2013
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