Open Air

Peer 2 Peer University Launches

August 14th, 2009 Posted by: lukebeaman

Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is alive and kicking, officially launching yesterday and offering enrolment onto their first course presentations. As previously reported, P2PU is an “online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”.

P2PU intend to leverage the power of the internet and social applications to empower communities and enable people to support each others learning. P2PU combines open educational resources (OER) with structured courses with the prospect of recognition, aiming to offer high quality education at low or no cost – the first course presentations will be free but P2PU are investigating pricing and may charge a fee for sign-up after the pilot.

P2PU’s pilot courses start on 9 September (sign up is by 26 August) and will run for 6 weeks covering a range of topics delivered at university level. Learning will be undertaken in small groups chaired by a volunteer either with expertise in the subject or with connections with others who do. The volunteer will organise the course and disseminate the course package which will contain the syllabus, study materials and schedule. Style of course structure and delivery may change as the process is refined over time with the eventual aim to create a learning platform that can be used by anyone to offer courses – much in the same way as OpenLearn’s LabSpace which allows people to remix and reuse Open University (OU) course materials to suit their purpose/audience. Currently P2PU are using a pbworks site but are apparently working on an open source solution for future – the OU uses a moodle/drupal combination for its virtual learning environment.

The initial course offerings are:

Introduction to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making

Copyright for Educators

Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature

Land Restoration and Afforestation

Open Creative Nonfiction – Take Away Narratives

Poker and strategic thinking

Although early days, P2PU have also considered accreditation and recognition, offering a certificate upon satisfactory completion of a course and encourage not only self but peer assessment. Learners provide feedback to other group members, with the aim of improving each others’ work through review. The Open University utilise this same model in its short course T189 Digital photography: creating and sharing better images where fellow students critique one another’s work to improve understanding and technique, leading to better images being submit in the final portfolio.

P2PU is currently run by volunteers and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation for basic start-up costs and receives admin and legal support from the University of California at Irvine.

Entry Filed under: oer