Background -- Website / Platform Update
- Migrated to new site 18 June 2011
- Good bye Drupal (CMS)
- hard to create an open source community
- hard to customize
- Hello Lernanta
- Django/Python
- Based on Batucada (Mozilla drumbeat.org)
- Led by full-time Tech Lead
- Open Source Community
- Currently version 0.8 (so 4 weeks away from finished minimum viable product)
- Changes
- More flexible (peer learning instead of top down)
- More social
Your Task -> Create a course on http://p2pu.org
- Work with at least one other person
- Pick a topic that you know "something" about (you don't have to be an expert)
- What are the key questions?
- What are some of the key resources (or how do you find them)?
- (Bonus) A course you'll actually offer on P2PU
- You want more people to know about something, or know how-to do something
- It will help your project
- I need your feedback
- P2PU Software: https://github.org/p2pu/lernanta
Course Titles and Links
- Creating a Citizen Science Project that Rocks (Francois, Helen, Kathi, Mark)
- Building a bad-ass social venture (Karen, Gavin)
- Policy Influence for Dummies (Steve, Andrew, Kabir)
- An Introduction to Data Wrangling: How to Get, Use and Share Data (Rufus)
- Fellowship 101: How to become a Fellow: (Karien, Wendy)
Dogfood Session Goals
(1) Feedback on platform
(2) Peer assist UPDATE: Skipped peer assist
- How to scale: learning model / business
Feedback / Notes:
- Sign-up/Login Process
- Could not log in with openID (3 times) - then got prompted to create a new account
- CAPTCHA problems
- Then passed CAPTCHA and got an error about my password being too short
- Course creation
- Once logged-in, hard to find the create a course page
- Schools:
- "What are the schools? Should I add my course to a school?"
- Course, study group, topic -- mixed terminology confusing -- welcome paragraph said create a topic -- that doesn't seem like the same thing.
- Definitions of "kind" unclear
- Which checkboxes to check? (closed, listed?)
- Want to add people as editors - not clear how to do that during course creation
- Opening a course for sign-up:
- The options for sign-up, listed, etc. are not clear
- Course Structure / Organization
- Why would I make something an external link? How is it different from a task? Not clear what it is.
- Not clear on next steps after creating course - the video/handbook should be highlighted on the create a course page
- After I've created the basic course, I am not sure what to do next? What's the next step? What are tasks? +3
- It feels like I need help with the next step
- Nice to have a wizard to help me through this?
- You need an introduction, b, c, ....
- Not clear on structuring course
- Is a "blank page" a good thing?
- Schools
- What does it mean to add a course to a school?
- Are we allowed to do that?
- Add more context information (roll over)
- Navigating back to my course is not obvious
Problem adding profile information, page would not load, instead generated page "You can't see this page". Since this is likely the first experience of p2pu of a new member it is very important that this should work.- Terminology:
- What is a "topic" (see on your dashboard message)
- Navigation / Design / CSS
- Course title runs too long (buttons float above)
- Image resize (profile image, course avatar) is annoying
- Edit button for task is in the wrong context (scoped to whole project, rather than task)
- Getting help
- Add more contextual help during the course creation
- Some users found the video (but most didn't like it)
- Instruction text is too long (but it's a hard problem to solve)
- Intro video needs to be much sexier - examples of people who have had a great experience. Teachers and students explaining why this is new, better different. A short run through the range of projects you could create. THEN you can start the boring stuff.
- Handbook not easy to find
- Would be nice to have single sign-on for OSQA
- Note (Philipp): Potential co-funded fellows pitch (Rufus, Mark H, Philipp)
- The new site needs a discussion board.
- Why is there no discussion board?
- Question: For discussion in the course?
- Steve Song; needs templates for tasks: read this, practising ideas, dicussion a reading,
- Why group external links? Is this a bibliography?
- Feature ideas:
- Idea: how about some standard format courses But in a visual overview mode - not step by step.
- Preloaded templates for courses
- How do I do a test / quiz?
- Allow private responses, but switch them to public later
- Ability to make a course private (github - if you want it private, you pay)
- Task reordering by drag and drop
- Notifications
- You get email notifications about new tasks all the times. This doesn't seem to be covered in the options, especially for projects where there are several people working on it.
- Wall / Activity stream
- Activity wall and message wall probably need to be separate or distinguishable.
- Add checkbox option to control the amount of things that go to the wall
- Activity wall could be a little more compact.
- Private Courses
- Courses that require privacy/confidentiality; for example a course on couselling people who have experienced trauma which invites participants to share their emotions after a traumatic experience. p2pu needs to avoid the liability that could arise through inadvertant disclosure of confidential material. On the other hand if everything is visible to everyone then some communities can't use p2pu. The best solution seems to be to instruct course organisers that if the course is going to ask participants to share sensitive information that participants should be warned at sign up to generate an email that protects their identities, and then to use user names that protect their identities. p2pu will then not have any private information, nor be able to link a person's actual identity to their participant identity.
- Private courses could be part of a fremium paid-for model
- Bug? in Personal Profile, adding a link to my blog worked but adding an RSS feed from it did not
- Structuring / Facilitation
- How do I facilitate the group? When to start tasks? Etc. *important*
- Draft Instructions to course participants "Your activity on p2pu can be seen by anyone, anywhere. Do you need to protect your identity? For example if you are an activist in an oppresive country and you want to sign up for a course that teaches the use of social media for political activism you might want to protect your identity. If so then please create a free email address that conceals your true name. Sign up using that email address and then choose a user name that protects your identity.But that is not all, be careful about what details you disclose in your participation. p2pu is not responsible for keeping any information that you submit confidential. See our privacy policy (link to http://p2pu.org/en/pages/privacy/
- How do I become a featured course? (charge?)
- The "minor edit -- don't put on wall" check box should be on every edit so you can control what goes on the wall and email.
- Not obvious that dates are optional
- Allow deletion of individual activity stream items, and also all items
- When you switch the course to "open" - it should be possible to hide the old activity stream. Make a clean slate.
- Some part of the full description needs to show at all time so you know what it is.
- Add the "see full description link" right below the small description block (e.g. read more)
- Change the sign-up indicator "Sign-up in progress" is not clear. Should be "Pending" (or something like that
- Redirect from www. to p2pu.org (have only one domain)
- Sign-up process
- Automatically making someone a follower is not cool (especially the notification is very confusing)
- Opening sign-up should be linked to from "Closed" text in overview box
- "Participate" button should be "sign up"
- What happens when organizer "deletes" the sign-up approval comment?
- Not clear how to approve people when they sign-up.
- On Dashboard, where courses I am following or participating in, show if the course has updates since I was last logged in
- Under My P2PU - why separate view profile, from edit profile?
- What's the "right" default behavior for clicking on Edit Profile (unlikely that the person will want to edit their profile often, but likely that they will edit their notifications.
- Create a sandbox course
- Not clear which courses / groups I am affiliated with (+1)
- On Dashboard, list "Organizing", "Participating in", "Following" -
- There is confusion between Following People and Following Courses.
- DNS Problem - need to rewrite www.p2pu.org as p2pu.org (for people who type in manually, and get logged out)
- Enable turning off notifications for courses under development. Could makes sense to prevent course organisers from turning off notifications once a course is open for sign up but it should be a choice during development.
- Have mouse-over explanations of Participate/Lurk/Track/ etc. Consider having 3 levels.
Discussion / Questions:
- Review notifications set-up
- Allow sign-up without questions? In addition to follow? (The issue seems to be that the form doesn't suggest one's existing details as a default to be edited during course sign up). Allow both "moderated" and "open" sign-up? Seems like consensus is that it is NOT required to allow open sign-up.