Open education in the wild: The dynamics of course production in the Peer 2 Peer University

June Ahn, Sarah Webster, Brian S. Butler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online, open education platform where any user can create a course, contribute content, or join an existing course as a learner. P2PU represents an experiment in organizing the production of entirely user-generated, open education. However, the open model of P2PU rests on the critical assumption that members can successfully coordinate and produce a sufficient supply of courses and motivate others to join in. In this paper, we use log data from P2PU to describe the dynamics of organizers-members who try to produce and launch open courses-and explore the factors related to their ability to successfully create courses on this open platform. We find that a critical predictor of successful course development is quickly finding likeminded organizers to collaborate with, suggesting that creating new education systems based on open, social computing platforms requires facilitation of key aspects of social coordination beyond providing platform and content resources.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1896-1905
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450329224
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 28 2015
Event18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 - BC, Canada
Duration: Mar 14 2015Mar 18 2015

Publication series

NameCSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Other

Other18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityBC
Period3/14/153/18/15

Keywords

  • Open learning
  • computer supported cooperative work.
  • open education
  • social computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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