I have more questions than answers. Some of these are things I wish I’d done better at P2PU. Some of this applies to tech projects more than other types of projects.

Change is good – It’s also frustrating, it’s hard, it drains your motivation and enthusiasm, and people don’t like it. But if you are building something new, dealing with change really is the one thing you need to be good at. Very few things will work they way you thought they would. When the ground under your feet moves – don’t panic, enjoy the ride!

What is the problem you are solving? – Never forget to ask this question. Never forget your answer. And make sure it’s a problem you care about.

Outsource the “plumbing” – Find people who will do your accounting, legal, HR for free (pro bono support is easier for non-profits) or pay for it. It’s a gigantic distraction.

Learn how to prototype and test – No matter how smart you are, or how well you understand your users, try out a new idea before you dedicate huge resources. And embrace the fact that you will always throw away the first version (unless you are ridiculously lucky, in which case you don’t need good advice anyway).

Be smart about your tech – Unless technology is the core of your business, use existing off-the-shelf platforms and solutions. Do NOT build anything yourself. You will regret it.

Update (thanks to the excellent Helen Turvey, and Steve Song). Added one more:

Bring a friend (or more) – Starting something new is stressful. Rarely do things go according to plan. Having someone who is in it with you is key. Not just for the days when you need a kind word, a kick in the butt, or someone to make a joke – but also for the days when you’re on top of the world. Cause it’s more fun to share! (hint -> sharing nicely!)

Update 2:

Chris has turned all the feedback she received into a collection of 64 Tips to Blossom and Thrive.

The path is more important than the destination. If learners are told that getting it right is the only outcome that counts, they won’t experiment. And they won’t learn. It is worth redefining the destination of learning and trying to explain what we hope learners will take away from a course. But it is more important to create the space for creativity, exploration, and collaboration that allows them to do things we didn’t expect.

What would a fail-safe learning environment look like?

Stakes are high, but not too high. Learners need to have a stake in their learning. Having a stake means getting frustrated when things go wrong. But the stakes should never be too high, failure in learning should never be catastrophic. It’s important to know when something didn’t work. Having to face mistakes can be frustrating. But it’s not frustrating if each mistake is seen as a small step towards success.

Tinkering encouraged. There are no “no U turn” signs. Good problems don’t have one right answer, but multiple solutions. Fail-safe environments celebrate experimentation as long as it is reflective. Getting it right is secondary. Understanding what went wrong is key.

Fast useful feedback. Feedback needs to be fast, so that we know when things are going wrong while we are doing them. And it needs to be useful so that we can identify different, more successful strategies for the next experiment. How do learners know if they are making progress if there is no feedback and opportunity to revise, improve, iterate?

And here is the crux with MOOCs. MOOCs are too big to support individual constructive failures. The moments that my colleague Natalie refers to as “flopportunities”. MOOCs require a focus on “right” answers, because dealing with ambiguity is hard at the 10,000 user level (let alone the 100,000 user level). This is why in our Mechanical MOOC experiment we added small groups and hope that they provide a safer space to ask questions and get things wrong. And who celebrate effort and experiments over final results.

And the same is true at the institutional level. Many of the early stage MOOC projects build sophisticated platforms, invest large amounts of money in content development, and are basically trying to take over the world. That approach doesn’t leave much space for experimentation, for failing constructively, and for letting more people participate in finding lots of different good models.

In a culture obsessed with “winning” and “success” it can be hard to accept that failure is what drives learning. But as Shimon Schocken said in his TED talk, “grading takes away all of the fun from failing … and a huge part of education is failing”.

Here is my nutshell summary of the panel:

Research suggests that introducing an extrinsic reward (in the form of a badge) will decrease existing intrinsic motivation. We also know and understand that many other factors can provide intrinsic motivation for learning. In order to avoid lowering participants’ desire to learn, we should therefor focus on understanding and increasing the development of the intrinsic motivation and refrain from introducing extrinsic rewards.

I am glad to see people like Mitch and his panelists add their thoughtful voices to the conversation. He is right that there is a risk that we get badges wrong. And he is right that the hype around badges may lead to the development of poorly designed badge systems that will at best not improve learning, and at worst hinder it.

But I believe that there is more to badges than their role in motivating learning. And that through careful design choices we can try to avoid the negative impacts he describes. After all that’s what his team at Scratch is already doing – experimenting with aspects of rewards that are not that different from badges, such as showing points for discussion forum participation and counting remixes.

The issue is not, “badges or no badges” The issue is how we can design badge systems that foster great learning practices. We will learn a lot more about how these systems work in the next year as the DML badge competition projects kick into implementation, but for now I would suggest two simple design principles to get us started in the right direction:

1 – Use badges to define roles rather than as rewards. In many learning communities users take different roles. Mitch actually mentions the importance of taking roles within a community like Scratch, but he sees roles as separate from badges. I believe that by recognizing roles – for example a mentor role – through a badge will signal to a new members of the community that mentorship is a valued practice within the community, and helps  them identify those who can help with problems and questions. And finally it may encourage users to strive to become mentors themselves. So rather than give badges as rewards they can help diffuse awareness of roles within a community.

2 – Anchor badges within community. The relationship between issuer and recipients will influence perceptions and expectations around badges. Badges that are woven into the fabric of a community of learning will be perceived less as extrinsic motivators, but as representation of core practices within the community. When the badge recipient feels ownership of the design of the badge, because she fully considers herself a member of the community that defines and issues the badge, the badge can provide an effective marker of learning pathways that help the learner to orientate herself within the landscape, and can act as a marker and pointer for new members of the community following in her steps.

It lists some of the pro-business (e.g. more private & less public, let the market solve our problems) arguments and those of us who don’t agree (including me) need to be prepared to argue the other side. The post also has a good thread of comments that cover some of the shortcomings of the pro-market positions (see one example below). I would add that other countries with strong public education systems (Northern Europe for example) do not exhibit similar cost increase in education. And the US health care system, which is highly market driven, is running up costs even faster than education. Both points suggest that this is not an economics problem, it’s a US problem.

OER is in an interesting space in this debate. I have seen “open” come under attack from both sides -> one side called it a right-wing effort to undermine the public education system by letting non-experts participate, others label it a socialist conspiracy that is out to destroy the publishing business.

You know you’re doing something right when you irritate all of the incumbents.

Example comments:

George Mitchell says:

“Parry says ‘I think the whole premise of this post is disingenuous. If it were the “public” in public education that was holding back this imagined productivity growth curve, one would expect to see private schools figuring out how to make the productivity happen.’”

Wow. Where to begin? In Milwaukee, independent research documents that private schools do as well or better with low-income students, and those students graduate at higher rates, than their peers in public schools. Yet private schools operate at a fraction — I estimate 2/3 — of the cost of public schools. Those are clear productivity gains that would soar if there were a true open market.

Reply >> michael mazenko says

George, the private school market has numerous advantages in cost – the primary one being they have no responsibility to provide additional, extremely costly services under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They have a right of refusal on their applicant base, and are dealing with no consumers who did not choose them. They don’t have to compete with Title IX requirements, nor do they have the same security concerns. The tit-for-tat cost between public private is a gross overgeneralization.

Thanks to Carolina Rossini for pointing me to the article.

Apple’s vision is a walled garden that offers a carefully curated experience to those willing to lock themselves into it. It will be shiny and beautiful, but education will be a commodity and Apple the company through which we will consume it.

MIT’s vision is bolder. It sets us on the course to an educational future in which anyone, regardless of background, budget or location, has access to a high-quality education – even those who don’t own iPads.

Returning to Berlin brought with it a good dose of nostalgia. We held our first ever workshop there in 2009 and we wanted to reconnect to the spirit and excitement of that event. At the time many of us had never met face to face and we weren’t sure what would happen. It turned out that we were not just a group of individuals interested in similar things, but a community with a shared purpose.

P2PU in 2009

Despite all of our different backgrounds, interests, and characters, we connected deeply – both at a personal level and with the idea of P2PU. We became friends and collaborators. And we couldn’t wait to get started. At the time we didn’t want to get bogged down by a long process of defining our vision. We knew what that vision felt like and that was good enough. In order to have a compass to guide our decisions we agreed on three core values of openness, community, and peer-learning and then we set out on the journey.

Barcelona 2010

The three values turned out to be good guides for our original community, but they didn’t convey the excitement and sense of purpose that we felt. They didn’t help new people connect to the idea of P2PU in the same deep way that we had connected with it. There is a certain magic that happens when a great group of people spends four days in a room and that is hard to convey digitally. But we also never clearly articulated what it was that drew us together and that made us so committed to the idea. As we grew it became clear that we needed more than three core values. We needed something that would not only guide our future path, but that we could share with others, and that would express what we stand for. We needed to write down our vision.

Berlin 2011

That is why at this year’s workshop we spent two long sessions trying to get to the bottom of some of the fundamental questions about P2PU. We asked ourselves what problem P2PU is solving, what unique approach or ability we bring to solving it, and what it is about P2PU that we feel so passionate about. In the coming weeks, Bekka, Jane, Nadeem and I will take a stab at turning our notes into a draft vision for P2PU, but I wanted to share some of my own take-aways for those who couldn’t be in Berlin this year:

• P2PU is a diverse community of individuals who are passionate about learning. We stand for human-centered education. We are not a product or a service, but a community that creates products and services. We thrive on experimentation.
• P2PU is a way to build the world we want to live in. We foster a culture of reciprocity, of helping each other out, of giving a leg up. The education system is in trouble and we want to help rather than point fingers or complain.
• P2PU is for passion-based learning. Everyone is passionate about learning something. P2PU is a place to identify that passion and we celebrate the long tail of learning and education.
• P2PU can scale. The traditional model works well for small numbers of learners, but quality goes down when numbers go up. As a result many people don’t have access to quality learning opportunities. P2PU’s open source model can scale.
• P2PU preserves the core ideas of the university. We are not against the traditional university, but want to help preserve some of its original values such as freedom of ideas, and a culture of learning through open sharing.

In the spirit of the old musically-themed P2PU newsletters I’m asking Joe Cocker to lend a hand in closing this post.

With a little help from our friends we are able to block out the noise and listen to the voice of our hearts. It’s a little help from our friends that dares us to follow our intuition. And it’s with a little help from our friends that we can become who we truly want to be. P2PU is learning with a little help from your friends.

It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

Rather than submit a more formal presentation or poster session, I thought I’d try to get some people to help me think through a fundamental question related to certification, “do we really need certification?” The format for “Testing Our Assumptions” is brilliant for these kinds of questions. And besides, traveling half-way around the world to give a presentation and speak at the smartest people in the open education space, rather than speaking with them, seems like a wasted opportunity.

Here is my proposal. Feedback welcome, and I hope to see you at the conference.

One of the most interesting topics in the open education movement focuses on certification and credentialing of learning achievements by participants in open learning environments. The underlying assumption is that we need some form of certification, to validate what we have learned. In this session, I would like to to suggest (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we can re-imagine learning as a process that is authentic, social, and open – we might not require a separate certification process. Achievements can be evident in the learning itself.

Does learning require certification?

Certification is a signal or currency, that lets us transfer achievements to those outside of our learning community. As a student, I don’t need grades to signal my skills to those I studied with – but to those who don’t know me, my abilities, or my achievements.

If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play

Jim Gee calls testing “primitive” and the result of poor learning design, and compares students to game players. There is no need for testing in games, because each stage of the game requires some form of mastery and achievement before the player can enter.

Does good learning create evidence, which can replace credentials?

If we follow Gee, we must ask if the problem with credentials is not rooted in the design of learning environments and experience. Can we borrow lessons from game design to make learning so authentic, engaging, and social that it produces all necessary evidence of achievements as a byproduct of the learning? (Or the other way around, does the learning become a byproduct of achievements?)

I should add that I am a terrible chess player – with or without a certificate.

Thanks to Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar I’ve spent some time this week trying to make sense of the latest developments in this space. Vijay and Brandon invited me to speak to the students in their “Open Education Practice and Potential” course at the Harvard Extension School about “Opportunities in Certification of Open Education” (slides are embedded below, and there is a recording of the elluminate session as well).

My core set of slides that I use in most presentations starts with the suggestion that “the system is broken“, which I think is true but also gets peoples’ attention. I then argue that because of open educational resources the content problem is fixed, and that increasing access let’s us connect to millions of other people to learn with. Which means “now everyone can fix the broken system.” Enter P2PU. While P2PU is a good example how this is true for the learning piece of education, is it really true for the certification/credentialing? Can the open education community hack certification?

To answer this question, I decided to walk myself and the group through the steps of creating a certificate that has value and legitimacy, and use examples that exist today to highlight my points. What do you need to make a certificate?

Step 1 – You need a source of authority

In the past, this authority came from the reputation of institutions (“Nevertheless, he’s an Oxford man.”) and an intricate system of accreditation bodies and quality review structures. It’s a system that works well for disciplines that don’t move too fast, and as long as it can reasonably be true that only a small group of “experts” really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, and there are many reasons for this, even this old system often breaks down (“Oxford, New Mexico!”) and increasingly relies on seemingly random college rankings to establish authority.

While it has its’ challenges, the existing system offers great opportunities for open education projects to move from the informal to the formal learning world – and give its users access to mainstream credentials. That’s why the University of the People is bravely working towards full accreditation, which will let them issue degrees that are equally recognized as other colleges in the U.S. P2PU has decided to not pursue accreditation – it felt like we’d have to give up the most interesting things about our model in order to qualify – but instead to partner with accredited institutions like the University of California Irvine for certification (that is backed by accreditation, just not ours).

But you don’t need an institution anymore to issue certificates. David Wiley (as usual, one step ahead of the curve) already did this a few years ago in his “Introduction to Open Education” course where anyone who completed the materials could request a Wiley Certificate. But David Wiley is a Professor at an accredited University, so he is still part of the accredited system, right? Right! But you don’t even have to be a Professor, or have a college degree for that matter, to do the same. John D. Britton, Software Evangelist at Twilio and maverick geek, credentialed participants in his P2PU course by leaving recommendations on their LinkedIn profiles. And they listed the P2PU course in their education history.

Maybe the most exciting example of new sources of authority is Stack Overflow’s Career 2.0 portal. The details are worth their own blog post – but essentially Stack Overflow has found a way to surface community rankings and evaluations in a way that can replace degrees. It’s much more granular and shows the specific skills and interests a developer has, it’s transparent because it links directly to the evidence for the results, and it’s based on the opinions of thousands of fellow software developers. Stack Overflow is betting that employers get more value out of reviewing applicants on Careers 2.0 that they would get from a college degree. And I think they are right.

Step 2 – Something to show your boss, and that you can hang on your wall … your Facebook wall

It’s great to have a wall full of degrees, but very few people get to see them. Wouldn’t it be more useful if we could instead share these degrees on our Facebook wall, our wordpress.com blog, our tumblr stream, and or our LinkedIn profile? And while we are busy hanging degrees, why not also share all the other achievements we might be proud of – the fact that we took a “Vegetarian Cooking” course at the Culinary Institute, that our fellow open source developers named us a “Community Builder”, or that we solved Mozilla’s “JavaScript Expert” challenge. We are entering future territory here, but this is exactly the kind of system P2PU is working on with Mozilla (and support of the MacArthur Foundation and friends) and piloting in the School of Webcraft. An open badges infrastructure that let’s anyone issue “badges” (that’s what we call these signs of recognition) and that let’s users move them freely around the web. For details check the background materials on the Mozilla wiki and follow Erin’s blog.