Sharing Nicely

At this point, I find the work on open accreditation to be the most innovative part of the open education space. It’s not just exiting because it cuts at the heart of how the education system supposedly validates learning, but also because it prompts us to ask big questions about the reasons for studying and learning, the performance of institutional structures that are in charge of measuring quality, and the possibilities of competition from both the private and non-profit sectors. In the context of P2PU, I am specifically hoping that there are opportunities to generate income from open accreditation services in ways that would help us achieve long term sustainability, but not jeopardize our full commitment to be free and open.

I was talking to the other P2PU founders last night and realized that while in my head, the open accreditation work at P2PU all fits together nicely, I hadn’t articulated well how all the different pieces together make a pie. This earlier post has a summary of early thinking on open accreditation. But we have added a number of things to our original plans since then:

• The P2PU/Mozilla Open Web project is taking off. The idea is to create an alternative career path for people who want to become web developers or designers: curriculum with the latest open web technologies, assessment that looks no just at technical skills, but also employment relevant soft skills, and a trusted certification with the P2PU/Mozilla brand. We have a drumbeat page to reach out to the community and John Britton, who is running the first open web course at P2PU, was contracted by Mozilla to coordinate the curriculum development part. Mark Surman and I started talking to more people at SXSW recently to pull them into the curriculum conversations. The idea is to form a larger community of experts who can help us identify the core skills needed by web developers, and design a set of courses that build those skills. If you are one of them or have recommendations, leave a comment here or sign up on the drumbeat page.
• The piece that had been missing in the P2PU Open Web project was assessment of soft skills, some call them ‘habitus‘ or ‘disposition‘ — it’s things like an attitude towards problem solving, leadership skills, the ability to communicate well with users and clients, and a sense of curiosity that makes some developers stand out. When we speak to employers, they rarely mention technical skills, those are assumed to exist. Employers want to see “work that was done” and have an interesting conversation about that work with the applicant. They also want to make sure that new employees fit into the culture and are able to work well with the existing team. A university degree has low predictive power in these areas. At the Mac Arthur Foundation grantees meeting, I spoke to Mimi Ito about our interest in assessing these skills, and she introduce me to a number of fantastic people in her network who are doing work on assessment. Together with Ingrid Erickson (based at the SSRC and involved in a range of Mac Arthur projects) we hope to bring together the different communities (assessment researchers, open web developers, curriculum designers, P2PU, Mozilla, outreach partners) for a small workshop some time in May. The goal is to design a few meaningful assessment models that we can then implement (aka write software and design processes to support) and pilot for the web developer courses.
• Our bigger workshop, provisionally planned for September at this point and supported by funds from my Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, will then allow us to step back and review what we have done in the P2PU/Mozilla Open Web project, look at other ways for assessment and certification, including community reputations, and develop a more strategic approach on open accreditation for P2PU. We are thinking of ways to reach out to the broader research community to get a better idea of the scope of work that is already happening. I expect that we will find interesting things in areas not typically associated with learning and ranging from collaborative filtering, and community reputations to semi-automated text analysis.

As you can see, we are biting off a bigger open accreditation piece than originally intended. And in order to pull all those pieces together we are planning to bring on a part-time consultant shortly.