School of Webcraft Peer Assist

P2PU's platform is maturing and we can now support both formal and freer styles of learning at School of Webcraft. How can we invite participation that lets us usefully scale?

http://new.p2pu.org/en/schools/school-of-webcraft/

Q3 Goals

• Growing Acceptance
• Diversity and Excellence in Core Content and Learning
• 4000 Active Participants  
• Scale Badges
• Migrate to New Toolset
• True Peer Learning
• 6  Languages (Eng, Span, Port, +3) 

Audiences to Engage

• New learners
• Existing web developers
• Content experts

Background

• Current Participation
  • 14 groups,  257 Participants,  457 Followers
  • 1 course on old platform, 50 participants
• Historically - invited individuals to run a 6 week course
• Instructor-led course model can provide strong content, but doesn't scale like peer learning
  • Limits number of learners per course
  • Huge time demands make it less likely organisers will rerun a course
  • Limited incentives - what is the benefit of teaching something for free?
  • Reduces incentives for users to actively engage as peer learners.
• To address these challenges
  • Introduced less hierarchical Study Group terminology and vastly improved platform
  • Developing an engagement ladder that turns users into learners, and learners into peer learners
• Peer learning doesn't feel natural (to many, especially non open source crowd)
• Both models suffer from drop-offs in participation after first few weeks of activity

Engagement Ladder

(Draft) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/920614/engagement-ladder-23May2011.tiff

• 1 Come to the site
• 2 Sign up
• 3 Start or Join a course or study group
• 4 Tell your friends & bring your peers
• 5 Work on tasks, challenges, and projects together
• 6 Earn Badges (and assess work submitted by peers (or maybe this is #7 - staying an active member of the community via assessments, contributions, etc) (... go back to 3 ... and do it again ... and again ... and ... )

Primary Questions

• What less intimidating ways can we find to invite useful participation and a first step onto a School of Webcraft Engagement Ladder?
  • Are there additional entry points to useful participation besides starting or joining a group?

• Promotional work / Using existing (Mozilla) channels - MDN - for people interested in web dev
  • Good write ups of existing courses to disseminate
  • Clear calls to action
• Demo videos (cool! +1)
• Ustream class hours like Cathy Davidson does with Hastac (rare, but an interactive door)
  • Mashup Universal Subtitles and P2PU for the intros to leap the langugage divide
• How about completing a study task without joining / creating an account? LIke the Hackasaurus missions that let you feel accomplishment without the admin hassle.
• Sow link seeds in lots of tutorial sites, like Quora and e-How or whatever. Such as: someone Googles "how do i use the image tag?" and they land on various pages with instructions. can we seed some links in the comments or elsewhere saying: learn more at P2P SoW? (you might want to be careful with that, don't want to do what might be considered spamming the answers and having it voted down...)
• Review what's already working elsewhere on the web. How are they doing it? 
  • e.g., StackOverflow. Quora. Get Satisfaction. 
  • Can you just post or answer a learning-related question? As opposed to starting or joining a study group? Or dive into an exercise or task?
  • Sow becomes a bit of a reputation giver/seeder? - the more and better the answers people give the better 'rep' they get.

• How can we turn users into peer learners? 
  • How can we encourage active participation within groups and courses?
  • How can we encourage users (people on the site) to "start" rather than "join" groups and courses?

• Pair learners (who don't naturally do this) with other learners
• Drip technology (automatic email, pre loaded, based on sign-up time, comes at specific intervals)
  • learn about who they are and why they're there +1
  • FYI narrative arc, "did you know?"
• Use traditional marketing and conversion techniques
  • announce list - (tick)
  • offer a current survey
• F2F meetups with study groups in same geo area. Like S(k)ool of Everything? http://schoolofeverything.com/ :P 
• map arc within site and use google analytics
  • identify work flow
  • believable interactions
• clarify "new" school of webcraft
• what are your responsibilities as a peer
• what are the multiple types of interactions from smaller to group to course
  • eg. Learn to setup GITHUB

• How can we usefully engage web development experts as advisors or participants?

• Use Mozilla Developer Network as a test case for devs acting as advisors / resource providers.
  • Point them to existing study group pages.
  • We need a light-weight, agile process for MDN (and others) to attach their resources to active study groups. 
    • The MDN community needs to be able to easily self-post their documentation & resources to (Lernata) course pages. 
    • it's too hard ATM
    • can they attach / how would they attach their resources?
• Outreach: Linkedin Group? Tech events? LUG groups. 
• testimonials from web devs+10
• Offer leadership training to them. This is a give back for their careers and helps the study groups.
  • what is the next step in their career
  • augmented training - 
  • flex Mozilla muscle
• surveys - again
• appealing to ego :-)
  • seed the community/ tech evangelists
  • engagement team
  • sense of giving back
  • it already exists - what's our identifying feature?
    • devs need to be visible in a community that matters to them
  • promotion from tech community - mozilla evangelists
  • matt and paul
    • rockstars as incentive to lead study groups
      • or "christian heilman is looking for people to run a study group"
    • anyone who runs or joins a study group - gets to come to Chris Heilmann video cast
      • social and personal and elite incentive
      • video the webinar

• Where do you need more help / support?

• Clarify what's on offer at SoW. What are the "atomic units" of learning? / the granularity

• If we can explain this to Matt, we're part way there.
  • This may help to clarify what's on offer at the "new" SoW. And clarify the pathways to creating peer learners. 
  • We've moved from "courses" to "study groups"
    • But what are the other "atomic units" of learning?
      • Study groups
      • Projects.
        • e.g., "Tweak the CSS on your WordPress blog."
      • Tasks.
      • Questions. ("How do I solve this javascript problem I'm having?")
      • Missions. ("Not sure what an attractive mission looks like for a web developer")
      • Milestones. "Now I can set up my website. Now I can insert a link."
      • Resources. 
        • e.g., "videocast of Christian Heilmann's HTML5 presentation"
      • "Rock star" brownbag. 
        • e.g., Christian Heilmann does a one-hour guest presentation on HTML5