P2P University Plans New Online Education

Set to open February 2009, teachers will be volunteers, courses will include a "very small sign-up fee," and it plans to work towards getting formal credit for completed studies.

Starting in February 2009, Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) will open its doors as an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU will help motivated students navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, create small groups of motivated learners, and support the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and it is working towards awarding formal credit for completed courses as well.

"In some ways it's a vetted book club, where you do exams at the end," said Joel Thierstein, one of the leaders of the effort, who is also executive director of Rice University's Connexions project, a free online collection of scholarly materials.

The P2PU concept was developed by 5 people with diverse backgrounds and skills, who live on 3 continents and span 4 time-zones, and who are committed to seeing this idea become reality.

• Delia Browne - National Copyright Director for Educational Materials in Australia. Previously Executive Director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia. Advocate, policy-maker, activist. Based in Sydney.
  
  
• Stian Håklev - MA student in Higher Education at University of Toronto, background in development studies. Participated in David Wiley's Intro to Open Education course. Activist for open access to research and open education. Based in Toronto.
  


• Neeru Paharia - Previous Director of Creative Commons, and currently PhD student at Harvard Business School. Film-maker, illustrator, blues-guitar player. Based on the East and the West Coast.
  
  
• Jan Philipp Schmidt - Open Education implementer at University of Western Cape and United Nations University. Open Courseware Consortium Board member. Based in Cape Town.


• 5th team member currently waiting for sign-off from legal team at his organisation

P2PU will initially offer 10 courses that will include: Open Economics, Media in Developing Countries, Non-Fiction Writing, Music Theory, Data Visualiation, and Alternative Energy. They will each run for 6 weeks, for a total of 100 - 150 students. They will be a break for 4 weeks after the first set of courses so that they can review the experience and make improvements to the model before starting the second round. During the first full year, it plans to run 4 rounds of courses, increase the total number of courses to at least 20, that are used by at least 50 learning groups, and reach 500 students.

"It's kind of design research — an action research project almost," said another of the university's founders, Stian Håklev, a master's student in online education at the University of Toronto who runs a blog about free-education efforts. He first met his colleagues by paying his own way to attend an academic conference in Croatia. "Maybe in half a year it will look different than what we thought, but that's part of the plan."

The P2PU offers scheduled "courses" that run for 6 weeks and cover university-level topics. Learning takes place in small groups of 8-14 students. Each course package contains the syllabus, study materials and a schedule (Learn more HERE). Most materials are stored on other servers and linked to - the P2PU does not want to become a content repository. Once they have been designed, course packages can easily be duplicated. This way, one structured set of materials can spawn many learning communities.

Courses are designed by someone with expert knowledge, a "sense-maker", and facilitated by a "class tutors" who is familiar with the content, and can support the group of students. Sense-makers identify the key readings, pose the big questions, and structure the content. For sense-makers the P2PU offers an opportunity to do what they feel passionately about - share knowledge. Tutors could be graduate students or amateurs with expertise in a particular field. They seek out a sense-maker to develop a course, and do most of the preparation work. Once the course starts, the tutors act as guides, facilitate discussions, answer questions, and providing feedback.

P2PU is open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection (and offline learning groups at a later stage). While students are one key audience, it is making special efforts to reach out to other groups as well. Retired baby-boomers looking for alternatives to expensive continuing education services, or stay-home mothers, lacking access to a campus-college are just two examples.

"While the P2PU offers new opportunities for these groups, all students benefit from diversity," reads the site."It's more interesting to exchange opinions with people who have different backgrounds and experiences to share."

In order to ensure that students are motivated and committed, they will be required to pay a small sign-up fee. The sign-up fee takes into account purchasing power inequalities especially regarding developing countries and for those who can't pay, it will always be waived. The P2PU only safe-guards the money, and students decide how it is spent after they complete the course. They can choose to either donate it to charity (selecting from a list of charities), use it for the next course, pay it out to the tutor, donate it to the P2PU, or use it to cover the cost for an external test/exam that would award credit for the completed course. To apply for a course, potentials students write a few paragraphs  about themselves and respond to a course-relevant question.

Course sign-ups aren't yet available, but you can join P2PU's mailing list to stay informed.