Sharing Nicely

I’ll be posting an update on P2PU next week (stay tuned!), but as part of preparing the pilot phase we have been thinking a lot about what we can learn from open source software projects in order to design effective learning communities. The similarities are striking and useful. I’ll write about interaction and communication today, but posts about reputation and accreditation and incentives are forthcoming.

Google’s open source blog has an interesting update on their Summer of Code project. In a nutshell, SoC is an online mentored internship programme for young software developers. Developers are paired up with experienced members of the open source community and work on real-world projects. It’s like having someon who is a bit older and has some experience to help with the potential pitfalls when joining an open source community (in addition to providing feedback on the technical work).

[Photo licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND by pixieclipx]

The organisers ran a midterm mentor survey to find out what makes some participants succeed more than others. The short summary:

1. The earlier a student begins interacting with the mentor/mentoring organization, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.
2. The higher the frequency of interaction, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.
3. Projects that are on or ahead of schedule are more likely to be interacting via real time methods of communication (such as IRC).
4. The amount of time spend during these interactions has a less clear relationship to the project status.

If we replace “project” with “learning”, these results are useful for the design of peer-learning communities. The first point is not such an issue for P2PU, because our courses will be run in a set timetable. Points 2 and 3 are interesting and suggest that there are clear advantages in synchronous communication, and frequent interaction. Many openly taught courses to date have relied on a distributed blog structure, where participants would work by themselves and post their thoughts on individual blogs. Others would read and comment, but there was always a risk that the discussion would disagregate — and that some posts might not get read. The Google survey indicates that having (at least) weekly chat conversations would increase the level of participation and keep learners focused. We are also experimenting with something called The Wire, which will make it easier to keep track of the disaggregated discussion – and combining the two approaches makes sense.

The Google folks are a little puzzled by the last point (as am I) and we’ll need more data to understand what exactly is going on here, but I suspect it has to do with different types and quality of interaction (and would very nicely support the P2PU model of self-learner communities). Rather than focus too much on the amount of interaction as the vehicle for learning, the timing and purpose interaction might be more important for online learning communities. The most successful Google interns seem to progress well on their own, and use the interaction with their mentors to address specific challenges and questions. A similar approach is possible for education as long as learners have access to a curated set of open educational resources and good pointers to help them navigate their own learning paths. The better prepared learners are individually, the more useful their interaction with each other then becomes. It’s kind of the opposite of the traditional lecture in which new knowledge is introduced to a group with relatively little opportunity to engage and discuss, since it takes time and thinking to develop good questions. The alternative model — which we like — would be to let students watch or listen to recorded lecture by themselves (when and wherever) and organise a meaningful and focused conversation about the content afterwards.

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