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.

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.

When we ran our pilot, many in the P2pU community including myself were shocked to see drop out rates above 50% in most courses. We had some courses where only very few people continued to the end. Our surprise was genuine, but maybe naiv (not a bad thing I would argue). It turns out that our completion rates were no worse (or better unfortunately) than those of online education in general.

I quote from Berge and Huang (who reference others)

Historically, the percentage of students who drop out of brick and mortar higher education has held constant at between 40-45% for the past 100 years (Tinto 1982). In the online learning context, dropout rates appear to be higher than for traditional courses. While there are no national statistics for completion rates of distance education students, dropout rates are believed by some to be 10 to 20 percentage points higher than for in-person learning (Carr 2000; Diaz 2002; Frankola 2001).

That means drop out rates between 50-65% are considered to be a reality in online education. Wow! (I haven’t done a comprehensive literature review, but some of the articles that are widely referenced are listed at the end of this post.)

I could try to make the argument that this is a success for P2pU – since our drop out rates are no worse, even though we do not offer any of the usual carrots (degrees) or sticks (fees) that keep people going usually. But unfortunately that would not be good enough. The P2PU learning model is based on a strong sense of community between peers – individuals who help each other to learn. Seeing peers drop out over time is terribly frustrating not only for the course organizer (I know, because I have spent a significant amount of time on instant messenger with course organizers who felt personally responsible and took each drop out very hard) but also for peer learners, who looser their peers.

The second argument I come across frequently when drop out rates come up, is that a high percentage of participants in online courses will only lurk and we shouldn’t worry about that. There is a whole book shelf of academic literature on learning by lurking and the invisible student. I am not arguing that lurkers are not learning anything, but in my personal experience and that of P2PU, it is not the lurkers that benefit most but the doers, the tinkerers and the creators – and that those are the people you will want to take a course with. It’s no fun to be in a room full of invisible students.

That’s why P2PU is aiming for low drop out and lurking rates. Very low ones. It’s always dangerous to nail your colors to the mast, but I would go so far to say that in the perfect P2PU course, less than 10% of participants drop out or don’t participante. (Please note that this is me speaking in my personal capacity – and not necessarily the opinion of the P2PU community!)

I think there are many aspects of online courses that can be improved to reduce drop out rates and increase participation, but two fundamental things that enable us to shift from more than 50% leaving to something much better:

• Make it difficult (to join) – In our pilot phase (as well as the first round of courses we ran this year), it was too easy to sign-up for a course. As a result many people signed up because the courses “sounded interesting” without really asking themselves if they were ready to make the commitment necessary. By increasing the sign-up hurdle, we can help users think more carefully about joining a course. This hurdle should not be designed to test expertise or intellectual capacity, but motivation. If someone puts in a few hours of work to complete and submit their course sign-up form – they should be allowed to join.
• Make it personal – The interaction between participants is crucial in creating a social bond that helps people keep going when their busy lives pull them in other directions. One participant in the pilot stated that she knew one of the other participants by name (and assumed the same was true in the other direction). She said she struggled to keep up with the work, but pulled through and completed because she didn’t want her colleague to think she was a quitter. By increasing personal interaction at the beginning of the course, the social ties between participants can be strengthened. Asking participants to upload photos of themselves helps with identification – and as we feel ourselves learning more about others, we assume they learn more about ourselves – and we start caring about their opinions.

Some research on drop out and non completion:

• Berge, Z & Huang, Y (2004) A Model for Sustainable Student Retention: A Holistic Perspective on the Student Dropout Problem with Special Attention to e-Learning. DEOSNEWS, Volume 13 (5) http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deosnews/deosnews13_5.pdf
• Carr, S. (2000, February 11). As distance education comes of age, the challenge is keeping the students. Chronicle of Higher Education, A39. (needs subscription)
• Diaz, D.P. (2002, May/June). Online drop rates revisited. The Technology Source. (online version).
• Frankola, K. (2001). Why online learners drop out. Workforce, 80, 53-58. (online version).
• Tinto, V. (1982). Limits of theory and practice in student attrition. Journal of Higher Education, 53 (6): p.687-700.
• Tyler-Smith, K. (2006). Early Attrition among First Time eLearners: A Review of Factors that Contribute to Drop-out, Withdrawal and Non-completion Rates of Adult Learners undertaking eLearning Programmes. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. (online version).
• List of articles on the topic at Learning Light.

Last week a meeting on “Learning, Freedom & the Web” hosted by the Carnegie Foundation brought together a mix of learning experts and web industry geeks to keep the web open for learning. One of the topics that bubbled up naturally was the rising popularity of gated digital communities such as Facebook and closed content delivery mechanisms like the iPad-iTunes-Appstore combination, and their implications for the future of open learning ecosystems.

Mike Hanson from Mozilla Labs sketched out what education could look like if redesigned by Steve Jobs. A vertically integrated content hosting and delivery solution built on Apple Server software and it’s iPhone, iPod and iPad line of consumer devices (of which over 100,000,000 have been sold). Textbooks are stored in the iTextbook store – and organized in appropriate collections for students who automatically download all the content they need to the range of IProducts. If you are an educator or administrator this new world of iEducation sounds pretty slick and compelling. And even if you are an open web activist like  Mike Hanson it is hard to resist – in fact, it was his own brand new iPad on the table that got us started on this  trajectory.

And because curation and integration are so compelling when designed well, we need to carefully think through the implications now. If a personal computing experience built on open standards is the crib, then learning and freedom might be about to go out the window.

As we know already there won’t be any porn in Steve Jobs iEducation ecosystem, but there also won’t be much messiness and tinkering and the kind of practices that characterize constructivist learning processes. There is value in a curated and integrated entertainment experience – I myself have marveled at the ease of purchasing and downloading a digital album directly onto my phone and then syncing it into a music library stored on my computer. However, I am a music consumer – and in meaningful learning systems there are designers, builders, players and doers – but no consumers.

Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation made the connection back to the education system. Half thinking-out-loud, half predicting the trouble to come she suggested that the vertically integrated learning ecology that devices like the iPad enable are perfectly in line with the way the current education system is structured – and will therefore be happily embraced by it.

That’s why we need to understand the long-term implications, push the closed model to at least offer open interfaces and transparency, and put in place open alternatives that offer value in ways that closed approaches can’t.

What could have turned into a pretty gloomy afternoon, was saved by the same innovation process that the open web is so good at: identify the pieces that are in place, see how they can be connected, and start designing and building. We came up with 8 concrete project ideas that are made possible by combining an open source attitude with a deep passion and concern for equitable learning.

I won’t list them all here, but there are a few that are most relevant to P2PU and which we volunteered to play a part in.

• The P2PU School of Webcraft – our partnership with Mozilla to radically innovate how web developers get trained and find jobs – fits within a broader bucket for linking community assessment, badges (think boy scouts), and employment opportunities. It raises questions about ownership and control of the individual’s education data – the obvious answer coming from the open web community is that it should be the individual who is in charge of her learning data, but the reality today is that lots of different pieces are stuck in different institutions. Thinking beyond web developers, we’d like to find a few other areas where this would work.
• Does open increase equity? - Mimi Ito reminded us that for open learning to become more than just another opportunity entrenching inequality in education, it needs to increase equity and access. She suggested we needed empirical research to identify areas within the closed certification system that are truly broken and investigate how new open approaches like the one described above could help fix them. I believe web development is one such area, where employers find that existing university degrees or private training certification have little to say about an applicant’s abilities as a web developer – the truly relevant things are not assessed – but Mimi is right that we need more robust research to go from anecdotal evidence to validation of these claims.

Other projects included formal university courses where students engage with Wikipedia content, a look at opportunities around Google Apps (which raises interesting questions about which aspects of an open ecosystem need to be open), and concrete ideas for working with particular programs and partners, for example Road Trip Nation.

The small event at Carnegie was just the beginning of new collaborations between the open web world and learning. Those projects that can demonstrate they are moving forward will meet again to plan the next stage of implementation in September, and hopefully have first prototypes to share with the world in November – where the Mozilla Drumbeat festival in Barcelona offers an opportunity to showcase our work, and reach out to more collaborators.

It’s a first attempt at video blogging. I am still a little uncertain which types of messages and comments video is better suited for than written blog posts or audio recordings, but no better way of finding out than trying. Any comments on content, format, presentation are much appreciated.

Videoblog 1 (21 April 2010) from Philipp Schmidt on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jim Groom and Joss Winn and Hans Poldoja (neither one is in the picture) for conversations about a combined blog-aggregator/discussion-forum that would be really useful to follow the kinds of disaggregated discussions that take place in many open education courses (like this one, this one, or this recent Mozilla/Creative Commons one). It’s one of those things, that we all felt was so obviously useful that it just had to exist … but it didn’t. So with a little help from my friends (and some new friends) we built it, in one day.

The Wire (pre-alpha) is a simple way of keeping track of what’s going
on in a course discussion. It’s like a content stream that aggregates
discussions which take place across many blogs. When readers click on
the post or comment headings, they are taken straight to the original
blogs. What neat about is that it brings together posts and their comments.

This version is built with google forms, yahoo pipes, a bit of open standards and you can roll your own in an hour or less (or much less if you are Tony Hirst). An example is at http://p2pu.pbworks.com/Wire, a pbwiki site we have been using for some peer 2 peer university tech prototyping.

Here is how it works. I created a google form that collects feed URLs. The form is embedded into the wiki page, which looks like this:

A yahoo pipe then collects the list of feeds via the CSV interface for google spreadsheets (Publish as a web-page, then select CSV). Here is what the link looks like: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rkfTjEyTRbZlaJS6URg8CbA&output=csv

The pipe fetches all blog posts and all comments and does some fancy sorting to make sure it all comes out in the right order. A huge thanks to Hapdaniel “The Pickled Piper” whose yahoo pipes wizardry pulls it all together. You can get the pipe and improve it here.

If you go to the site, you can try adding your feed URL and watch it get added to The Wire (sometimes yahoo pipes needs a few moments).

It’s far from perfect and I’ll be spending more time on design aspects and various other bits. If you want to help, please leave a comment or get in touch by email.

Voila – thanks everyone for the ideas and the help, and really making my day. Hapdaniel, you rock! And special mention to my friend Tau Tavenga for introducing me to this Wire

Here is the (one) other nice thing about those 11.5 hour flights: