community-20120524

Attendees (welcome to any newbies)

Add your name (and twitter handle) here
- James- @kinkypedagogue
- dirk
- Bekka
- Alison
- Philipp - @sharingnicely
- June - @ahnjune
- @jessykate

Standups What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)

Alison
- Filtering in new courses
- Directing questions on help desk
- Planning fo rounds
- Filling out job description
Bekka
- Berlin planning
- HR
John (on holiday)
Philipp
- School of Data workshop Berlin - http://schoolofdata.okfnpad.org/sprint-may-2012
- Budget 2012
- Headless MOOC
- Hiring dev
Dirk
- Deployed updates to server
- Server admin - investigating cause of downtime
- Working on course creation
- Split static and media files
- Dev related blog post: http://disfunksioneel.blogspot.com/2012/05/learning-lernanta.html
James
- Working on a proposal for a new challenge, wokring my way through the challenge creators' challenge and the contributing to lernanta challenge
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News of the week Written notes on what's going on in our world (bring up special announcements on the call)

Key updates Super short updates about P2PU

Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
- Fits into Jessys challenges --> https://p2pu.org/en/groups/ethics-committee-for-independent-reseachers/
  - (jessy) ^^^^ YES!!! /me dances
- Could use community input or co-organizer --> http://p2pu.org/en/groups/ux-designing-for-education/
- Badge Maker --> http://p2pu.org/en/groups/how-do-i-make-a-badge/
- 1st School of Data course -> https://p2pu.org/en/groups/1-use-data-to-show-how-your-country-is-unique/ (please test drive)
  - Strong demand for facilitator role in challenges
- Swedish/Hakan Wester:
  - http://p2pu.org/sv/groups/skapa-en-distanscirkel/
  - http://p2pu.org/sv/groups/studiecirkel-om-multiplayerdataspel/
  - https://p2pu.org/sv/groups/kreativt-skrivande/
  - PS: Can we invite him to the community list? He seems awesome. Yes.
- Conspiracy Theories:
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/pseudohistory-for-conspiracists/
  - https://p2pu.org/en/groups/public-intelligence-in-the-public-interest/
Development priorities (Dirk)
- Course creation UX - 1 page task edit and creation
- Improvements to notifications
  - Improved subject line (currently being tackled by Philipp) - ha, nice one!
- General housekeeping
  - want to update old libraries
  - use specific versions for all dependencies
State of the mustard (Philipp)
- 5% down for the month (still a week to go)
- Power of "great courses" - focus more on supporting high quality courses

Agenda Core of the call. Focused on four types of conversations (invited guests, challenges you need help with, proposals you want feedback on, ideas you need collaborators for).

Philipp Schmidt / Headless MOOC (massive open online course/community)
- Existing MOOCs reach many people, but are expensive to build and don't encourage much peer-to-peer interaction
- How can P2PU build a MOOC without facilitators and using existing tools / platforms?
- Benefits:
  - Low cost project with high impact (potentially)
  - Perfect role for P2PU to connect the dots, add glue, prototype a new model
  - Leveraging what's there, building social structure around content
- Headless MOOC
  - Built around MIT OCW content
  - A "course pacemaker" manages sign-ups, grouping of users, email heartbeat
    - P2PU "scripts" the experience
    - Develops and hosts the pacemaker
    - Weekly email reminders to direct users to the week's content and support services
  - Q&A support with an OpenStudy group
  - Linked to codecademy programming tasks that match the content of the course

June Anh / University of Maryland - Research collaboration between P2PU and UoM
- Scope of work: Some data from School of Ed has been given to June and his team,
- Looking through data to identify interesting questions to ask
- How to promote participation and activity in courses
  - Finding some interesting things. Noticed that there was no correlation between the number of comments a facilitator posts and how long users stay engaged. But strong correlation between other users' participation and users staying engaged
  - Seems like if you go to P2PU course and see organisers doing all the acvity, you might not be so interested in participating, but if peers are doing the "work" people might be more engaged.
  - Some awesome findings, but the data is a little limited - would like access to more data
  - Would like access to deeper data
    - Need to figure out an ethical and good workflow for everyone to allow access to data and feedback from this - what would be a good iterative process?
  - Also looking at whether the structure of the group has an effect on the way / influences how people participate
  - Philipp -> Some questions we need to examine: we need to figure out who "owns" the data in our database, but the intention is to anonymise the entire database and make it available to June and his team
  - Philipp -> we have a lot of courses that never take off. Wondering if there is any connection between the way courses are put together/operate and the amount of participation that takes place
  - June -> at the moment, we can't make comparisons like that, because the sample is too small. But looking at the data we do have, it seems as though the size and strcture matter a lot.
    - Also, the fact that people designate themselves followers or participants (which is really nice) has an effect on the way people participate.
    - Also, the way the facilitator sets the course up (many pages vs fewer) has an influence,
    - And we think the way the information is communicated has an influence (lots of reading equals less participation and but pages where feedback is required seem to have more participation).
  - Philipp -> in courses where there are a lot of pages, it would be interesting to know when the pages were discovered - during the time that the course is running, or all set up beforehand?
  - Philipp -> how much involvement from P2PU people who know how things run would be useful to the researchers?
    - might be able to work together to identify new types of actions to log, and/or db structures (eg. are we logging or overwriting changes to content, relationships, etc.?)
      - June -> it would be very helpful, a great idea. There needs to be a tight integration between folks handling data and people implementing systems, so we can make sure that we can get the data in a way that is useful.
      - So yes, you do kinda need to be part of the research team!
    - Process moving forward (P2PU feedback on this would be good)
    - Iterative research cycle - observe (define a question to explain observation), then determine what data is needed to answer, do analysis, make changes to the system, and start over
    - P2PU people know how the ecosystem works, and how people are participating. So P2PU people might be the best folks to help identify high impact questions
    - Then we'll know what data to collect, and see of we need to code in something else (a way to measure something) or if we can just go ahead.
  - NEXT STEPS: for philipp to finish the MOU
    - P2PU people need to start thinking about questions
    - jessy/vanessa/june (stian?) to chat w june to set up an "open research notebook" for this research

General discussion and questions

School of Ed Summer Courses (announcement)
- Between june & july
- Courses: PhET Simulations for Science and Math, Global Dialog: International and Comparative Perspectives on Education, ePortfolios for Teachers, Syndicated Education in Distributed Learning Environments, Content Curation, & Developmental English Curriculum Planning.
- Partners: National Writing Project (NWP), PhET at the University of Colorado, the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), Bon Education, and K12 Handhelds.
- www.p2pu.org/school-of-ed - please spread the word!