Reports

College Unbound and P2PU are two education projects with very different communities and approaches, and very similar philosophies.

We decided to create our own. Our goal was to create an online course more aligned with our own educational sensibilities and style. We were not opposed to “massive” but it was not our first priority.

Real-life problems often have dozens of potential solutions. As long as there is one right answer, we’re competing for a scarce amount of knowledge.

Play With Your Music is about learning music while playing with music. It’s a hands-on introduction to the creative processes of audio engineers and producers. The first six-week course provided an introduction to critical listening, strategies for learning from recordings, musical uses of audio effects, mixing and remixing.

What we would like to suggest is an approach that great instructors already know to be true. When a student gives feedback or support to another student, that process deepens their own understanding.

As learning on the web has evolved and “grown up”, a few innovative trends have emerged. Certain principles tap all the connectedness that the web has to offer. Of the learning communities we consider successful and that we admire, several share the some principles

As a learning community, P2PU is part of a larger ecosystem of online education with different trends, economic models and approaches to recognition and measurement. From where we sit, assessment is the biggest hurdle to innovation in how people learn.

In late 2011 there was a rumbling in the air around the open education space. Massive, open, online courses were springing up all over the web. Two distinct types begin to emerge out of the MOOC model - Connectivist MOOCS (or cMOOCS) and Instructivist (or xMOOCS). Both were large-scale online learning experiments, with very different theories of learning behind them.

Many of the professional development experiences available to K-12 educators are lackluster; at their worst, they can be uninspiring, inauthentic, and ineffective. At it’s best though, professional learning can be stimulating, inquiry-driven, and powerful. It can ignite the lives of both teachers and learners. The question then is, how can teachers be helped to spend more time in these rich experiences? What is it that sets these experiences apart?

In 2012, we decided to try running a pop-up office for 1 month. This report documents the set-up, experience and evaluation of the pop-up. Distributed working is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the non-profit and tech worlds, where staff with expertise may be located in several countries.