I consider myself to have been very fortunate to be invited to attend the Peer-to-Peer University Workshop which took place a little over a week ago in Berlin. The purpose of the Workshop was for the community of volunteers currently organising and running P2PU to reflect on the initial pilot; to discuss what worked, what had not, and to reach a consensus on, and plan what do next.

Photo by John Britton CC-BY-SA

The scope of the workshop, the breadth of topics that needed to be discussed, on which decisions needed to be made and consensus reached seemed overwhelming at first. I vividly recall walking in and looking around at our Wall of Ideas, which was littered with post-it notes, and wondering whether we’d get through all of this in the relatively short amount of time we had. The workshop was divided up into a series of discussions, and breakout sessions where we split into small groups to discuss specific themes, each small group identified what it believed to be the main issues P2PU needed to face/address within that theme and then made recommendations back to the entire workshop for addressing those issues. The entire group then discussed all the issues that had been identified and reached a broad consensus. The themes for the breakout sessions were:

• Designing and Running Courses
• How to build a working P2PU machine
• Managing Courses
• Building Communities
• What is the role of P2PU in Education
• Technology

There were many different ideas discussed during these sessions, and far too many to cover in a single blog post. For me personally some of the most interesting ideas that emerged from the discussions centered around the role of P2PU in education. In a previous post I discussed my own experiences as a student in a P2PU course, an experience which for me was entirely positive, but I was fortunate to be in a class of passionate and highly self motivated learners who all wanted to contribute in a positive way to all of the discussions that took place and the assignments that were set. What made it such a compelling experience was a) the transparency and b) the social wrapper or social experience that the class created around the material we were studying, which was recently reinforced for me at the JISC Cetis Conference where Oleg Liber asserted that “education is a social experience“. The importance of providing a social experience was a recurring theme during the workshop and generated some interesting ideas, for example:

Consider that there is a wealth of material available, freely accessible, on the web under the moniker of Open Educational Resources or Open Courseware such as the course related material made available by MIT. As an individual I can draw upon this material and work through it myself, but without access to an expert or to a study group I’m effectively on my own. What if P2PU could bring together individuals interested in the same learning goals and provide the social wrapper around some of this openly available material? When we reflect on this in the context of recent announcements to cut adult education budgets then initiatives like P2PU, which are trying to provide sustainable online environments for learning, seem hugely important to the future landscape of education, and achieving the vision of bringing education to all.

It’s impossible to talk about education without also talking about accreditation, which was also discussed at length. What I found interesting was that most of the group felt that there is a distinction between validation and accreditation, and that the former can be a conduit to the latter. Validation in this sense can be feedback from your course facilitator, or feedback from the peers on your course or the wider online community, again this would be a key attribute of the social wrapper that the courses provides – in fact as a group we spent time discussing the importance building a community that understood the importance of this as a form of reciprocity as an established community norm. For example, on the Cyberpunk literature course we were assessed not only through our assignments but also through our engagement, students were required to provide feedback on each others work.

If we separate learning from accreditation, then it could be argued that accreditation doesn’t necessarily have to happen within structure of P2PU itself. Consider examples like Western Governors University, which provide accreditation without students necessarily having been taught by the university itself. Furthermore professional qualifications in industries such as IT have often been based on this pattern: students find the material themselves, study it, and when they feel ready pay an accrediting body a fee to sit an examination. Could P2PU, or initiatives like it, be a model for the future? not by replacing traditional institutions but providing a framework that could sit alongside traditional institutions and help make education, as a social experience, accessible to a wider range of the worlds population? It’s an ambitious vision, and one that I’m proud to be supporting.

For those interested in learning more, there are detailed notes from the entire workshop available online here. Furthermore, Jane Park, who also attended the workshop, has written a personal piece which conveys the transformative effect this workshop had on the members of the group that attended.