Call for course organizers is below:

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a great place to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we’ll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we’d love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community – so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we’ll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We’d love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we’re inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We’ve made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course -> Fill out this short form.

If you’re unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

If you are interested in taking a course -> add your name.

Join the P2PU Webcraft community -> subscribe to our mailing list.

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.