Who needs credit these days anyway? Peer to Peer University (P2PU), if you’re not familiar, is a free, open, online “university” (non-accredited) that offers courses I never would have found at the University of Vermont (no offense UVM, but you’re not exactly pushing the boundaries of higher learning).
This whole notion of free, online, open learning has captivated me, whether through MIT OCW, University of the People or P2PU is a great leap in access for learners everywhere. After just a week of the Digital Journalism course I can say that the course has very much exceeded my expectations. Here are a few reasons I was interested in the course:
- it’s FREE education, man!
- I run Moodlenews.com, which is fun, but I’m always looking to improve the site so learning a little more about real digital journalism practices will be a good exercise for my brain
- who doesn’t need to improve their writing?
- I need/want/yearn for constructive feedback. Comments are great (if you get them) but otherwise I’m left wondering where my writing falls on a scale of ‘crap to awesome’.
- Finally, I want to learn first hand if this model of education is worthwhile. What happens when students globally take a course for no credit while students locally take the same course for credit? Can it work? If it does, what does that mean for the future of credit? (because they’ve essentially become valueless in that scenario).
And to be fair, these are a few reasons now why I’m glad I enrolled,
- this is the most culturally diverse and global education experience I’ve ever had (the main body of the course meets in Japan)
- Joi Ito (CEO of the CreativeCommons) is one of the leads, as is Mohamed Nanabhay, head of online at Aljazeera English. I haven’t had teachers this good since Robert Kaufman, Kieran Killeen or Madeleine Kunin.
It’s my hunch that organizations like P2PU will continue to grow in power and influence in higher education. Already they’re redefining what it means to take college level courses and grow professionally. Perhaps someday my kids will earn a degree for free from P2PU based on the legacy of the volunteers that are running it today. My participation only furthers that goal.
Hi Joseph, thanks for the nice words. It’s very exciting to see how the course is developing, and following the conversations. This is also the first course run on our platform after some pretty major work, so it’s great to see that it’s flowing fairly smoothly (although there is no doubt that improvements can be made).
I’d love to hear more detailed thoughts about how you thought the course process had worked so far, and also how the platform is working out – possible improvements etc. There are some discussions about this already going on at P2PU Lounge (http://p2pu.org/node/809/forums). But if you post it on this blog, and tweet it with #p2pu, I’ll also be able to find it.
The process so far has been good. I think that the overall layout of the course could improve. One thing I would love to see is better urls for the various courses and sections. #s and letters are all ok, but if the course was “p2pu.org/courses/kmddj10” things might be easier to navigate.
I do like the unwalled garden approach, using Moodle and Blackboard daily gives me a different perspective of course materials (mostly to keep proprietary info safe). I’d be interested to know how P2PU would implement assessments that were more formal or what it would do to manage grades privately between students and teachers.
Just a few thoughts…