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- The End of Courses: Capturing Meaningful Reflections Sat, 2011-05-14 18:03
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The End of Courses: Capturing Meaningful Reflections
The end of a P2PU course can be an ambiguous thing for some organizers - but it doesn't need to stay that way. How do you wrap up a course? How to do capture meaningful reflections and feedback? What happens next?
I'd like to start a conversation around best practices for ending a course. Because each course differs in its style of participation, one prescription may not fit. However, encouraging all participants to reflect on their experience is a valuable suggestion for any course. Participants should be encouraged to think about their original expectations, the role of the organizer, but most importantly their role as a peer learner. Did they fulfill their role? What were the highlights? What would they improve about the course strucure and their own participation? WOuld they want to lead a course/study group of their own in the future?
I encourage everyone to add ideas and suggestions here, as well..
Read more: http://wiki.p2pu.org/finishing-a-course
AFAIK, most of these courses have been ending with a whimper, not with a bang. I think this is partly due to the fact that individual learners have little commitment to P2PU as an institution. I think steps should be taken in the design so that the chain participant-course-p2pu is shortened to participant-p2pu. This definitely leaves courses in an ambiguous state. Hopefully the important design discussions around this and associated revisions will be front and center for P2PU in coming months.
Interesting thoughts. Many of my course participants seem to have a stronger association with the course than with P2PU, though it's all over the board. In discussion design issues with my participants, some have compared my course to other non-P2PU courses without a real understanding of some key differences (peer learning focus, volunteer instructors, etc.). Others who are taking other P2PU courses have shared with me the differences from course to course, which are significant.
The role of the course may be ambiguous, but even more so may be the role of the facilitator. (See http://www.k12opened.com/blog/archives/468)
I am thinking a lot and trying to reconcile my own goals, the approach of P2PU, and the needs and wishes course participants are expressing. Lots to think about, but lots of fun to think about it!
Interesting - I hadn't though about this in terms of identification. In the early days, it felt like everyone involved in P2PU, identified with the project as a whole and wanted to be part of the core P2PU community - not just their individual courses. As we grow, I suspect that is changing, and more users will primarily be interested in the learning experience and the community that forms around their course, or sets of courses they participate in. These users are likely to expect a less experimental experience, and be less interested in the types of discussions that take place on the community list. In the long term the main "community" of P2PU might be people who are not actively involved in those discussions.
I think very few people in the general population would recognize any of these terms:
But even concepts from the "early days" have wandered around a bit. Compare your conceptualization of P2PU today with this presentation:
Neeru Paharia, Big Ideas Fest 2009
"Hacking the Social and Structural Elements of a Free Education" by Neeru Paharia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wxUbU1W_0
Great find. Here's a screencap of an important slide: http://metameso.org/~joe/images/p2pu-vision.jpg - from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wxUbU1W_0#t=12m21s -- the video clips that follow are great too.
Has the conceptualization really changed? Or just failed to materialize (yet) because some of these things are really hard?
We can dicker over our interpretation of the trajectory that has been taken to date, but suffice it to say P2PU has not yet converged to vision represented in that video. Despite all the issues, problems, inefficiencies, mis-communications, challenges etc that might be encountered, the two overwhelming forces at play are (1) the high demand for alternative educational opportunities and (2) the escalating cost of traditional educational programs. I don't see developing P2PU into the project envisioned in the video as so much of a "hard problem" but rather a process that has to be iterated and continually improved until a "sweet spot" of operation is discovered. In a couple of course cycles we can work out the problems and make changes and improvements rather quickly - vastly quicker than a brick and mortar institution can revamp their offerings given the fact that they are saddled with bureaucracy and have to justify and monetize their every move.
BTW, that is the first time I noticed you can put a fragment identifier (#t=12m21s) at the end of a YouTube URL to provide a pinpoint reference to a starting point identified by minutes and seconds. Very useful and serendipitous.
I agree wholeheartedly with Karen's point in her blog that w/o a strong facilitator a course on P2PU is quite likely to die off, or only have one or two people finish. That has certainly been my experience in the course I have run (Copyright 4 Educators).
I'm wondering if anyone has run a course where the peer learners really took control and kept the course moving along without much effort from the course organizer. I'd be very curious to know if there are certain subjects or course design elements that are better for peer learning than others...
How many hours a week, and how much interaction makes for a strong facilitator? I've been committing over 12 hours a week to chat interaction time (that does not include any other work time for the course), and the participants have just ... tapered off. I can send out reminders, post questions, make suggestions, extend chat hours and do presentations, but if the participants just are not participating, I'm not really sure what else I can do.
Excellent questions!...and ones I think it would be good for someone to make some suggestions (expectations?) about. I too have been spending upwards of 10 hours a week on this. While participation has dropped off, those who are participating have expressed a preference for active facilitator "presence."
I have said this elsewhere, but I think that the current system's communications tools have been one source of the problem. (I know the system is being rev'd. Bravo!) Most in my course turned off all notifications, leaving me with no real way to communicate with them proactively since I couldn't get email addresses. I suspect that this plays some part in the participation equation, especially for chats. (Participation in my course was strong on asynchronous platforms, but very weak on synchronous.)
I was a participant in one course where this happened....David Wiley's first open ed course. (I think Stian and/or Philipp were in this course.) Of course, this was a very specialized audience because of the content...and even in that course, the vast majority of folks who enrolled disappeared after the first couple weeks. But there was a core of 15 or so folks who took off and even revamped the course while the organizer was mostly absent. (At least, that's my recollection.:)
With regard to the larger discussion, I don't think a strong facilitator and peer learning are mutually exclusive. But as P2PU grows, realistic and common expectations regarding this will likely lead to more success.
This is a really good conversation, and one we've been having often on the community list: http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-community. We've noticed a major trend over the past few rounds - participation in peer style courses seems to have an ideal lifespan of engagement for 2-3 weeks with participation lagging steeply thereafter.
So why 6 weeks? It's a rather arbitrary number that's based mostly on the length of traditional courses and in consideration of the generally busy schedules of people that get involved with P2PU (motivated self-learners). But in reality, if participatory communities have a short lifespan, then organizers struggle to extend the life beyond 2-3 weeks, creating a frustrating situation. So perhaps 6 weeks courses is not the best length to recommend in course design.
We've been playing with the idea of breaking up courses into shorter commitments, and encouraging participants to recommit there after, or break away appropriately. Any ideas or suggestion that you have as past organizers would be great to hear regarding suggestion for new modes and models..
My course doesn't officially end until March 29 but here is a short survey I put together to gather ideas: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/X9ZBLSY
I'll post the results when they are in.
I have learned a ton in this round of P2PU, both about my content area and about online and peer learning. I've been blogging about my thoughts at www.k12opened.com/blog.
Still thinking about what I'm going to do with the future iteration of this course and a couple others I have ready to go, but your thoughts have all been helpful. Thanks!
Are we supposed to be sending out tshirts or certificates to our participants? Most of mine are outside the US. I had no idea this was suggested or required and I do not have the liquid resources to do this.
The course about shell and unix (Interpete de Comandos y Unix) will end next saturday (God willing). It lasted 4 weeks, the first 3 weeks with contents and exercises, the last week only to review and complete exercises. The public domain material with exercises was preparaed before and is being updated with the feedback of participants.
We had 33 participants, no one resigned --I had to close inscriptions.
We had 4 chats (in average 4 people each, attached to each week material are the logs). We used forums for: welcome, enhance course material, help in exercises, feedback on methodology. In total 93 replies (15 people participated in forums different to welcome).
We used P2PU for communication and for some practices sdf.org with ssh/putty and other practices with their computers (terminal in Linux, Mac, OpenBSD and suggested Ubuntu LiveCD for Windows). The participants created some new documentation with open licenses, specially the first week, they are attached to: http://www.p2pu.org/general/node/27673/document/29302
Regarding the points at http://wiki.p2pu.org/w/page/34721952/finishing-a-course
1. The completed tasks are in the spreadsheet puntos.ods in the syllabus ( http://www.p2pu.org/general/node/27673/document/27674 ), from each participant I expected 45 points (in total of all the 33 participants 1485) in the moment of this writing the sum of points achieved by all is 219 (around 15% of participation in exercises up to now). This week I have been motivating them to complete the tasks, so I expect this will increase.
2. I'm promoting incentives to the people that completes more exercises: (1) more than 50%: no sign-up task in next courses that require this , (2) more than 70%: to organize next version of this course, (3) discounts in paid courses outside P2PU --the certifications would be on those courses.
3. The feedback is being collected at: http://www.p2pu.org/general/node/27673/forums/28779
4. I'm motivating for a next round of this course along with completing the tasks. I have been promoting p2pu and developing lernanta, some participants are testing new.p2pu.org and our test course there. (By the way I wrote documentation in spanish to help developing lernanta with OpenBSD, PostgreSQL and ksh, see: http://dhobsd.pasosdeJesus.org/?id=Desarrollar+Lernanta+en+OpenBSD+adJ )
5. We have been updating the contents, the one in P2PU and also the available at: http://structio.sf.net/guias/
6. Since the feedback is already in the forum and the people is still completing tasks, not sure if a survey will have success now.
Other suggestions for the finalization of a course:
* Promote the next course(s) --I have a plan of interrelated courses at least for this year https://www.pasosdeJesus.org/index.php?pag=capacitacion#modulos
* Ask for donations for P2PU and for the organizers (I did it at http://www.p2pu.org/general/node/27673/forums/30474). Since as far as I know in this moment is not possible to donate to P2PU, I told them they could donate to Drumbeat at http://www.drumbeat.org and to other organizations that are supporting me through PayPal from the link at the left of http://www.pasosdeJesus.org (By the way we have not received any donation up to now).
Course sounds great Vladimir. It is possible to donate directly to School of Webcraft (using Mozilla's infrastructure) at this URL:
https://donate.mozilla.org/page/contribute/webcraft
Thank you. I already forwarded that link in the same forum thread.
Vladimir,
This is extremely useful feedback. I am particularly interested that you created a forum for concerns (http://www.p2pu.org/general/node/27673/forums/28779), as it allowed you to communicate through any difficulties. I noticed a lot of it was about meeting times, which is no surprise, and also discussions about the use of material under restricted licenses and assessment. Well done.