Community Call 19 July 2012
Attendees
Standups What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)
- Alison
- Bekka
- Course promotion
- Berlin org stuff
- Performance reviews
- Thinking about community
- Vanessa
- John
- Philipp
- Staff goals
- School of Open helper
- Site design
- Dirk
- Alan
- Jane
- Molly
- School of Open
- Thinking about research questions related to P2PU
Key updates Super short updates about P2PU
- Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
- Development priorities (Dirk)
- State of the mustard (Philipp)
- Bright green (users, joins, comments all more than +5%)
- Curating our digital lives -> 150+ comments last week
- Everything is up! Groups created increase may have something to do with School of Open reactivating dormant courses.
- Haven't had a huge spike in traffic, but worth waiting to see what happens after the new courses announcement, although this might have something to do with summer holidays in the US.
Reportback from Dirk on Dev Priorities
- Mentorship application
- Alex has been working on this - we'll be looking at it later on in the agenda
- Design guide & UX guide
- Aleks S and Joao have been working on a design & UX guide, to help us build better features, make things more consistent and prettier
- Twitter bootstrap integrations
- This is related to the UX/Design guides, which will take a while
- Lernanta architecture
- Ice breaker application
- Alex is working on this - a technique to help people get to know each other better when they first join a course, something fun and lighthearted
- Wordpress themes - Open masters & P2PU projects (and improving functionality on http://info.p2pu.org)
- Pixel art for citizen science game
Vanessa: Burning Research Questions
- Good people of P2PU, *write your burning questions here*
- Step 1: What's your burning question about P2PU
- Step 2:
- Who would you want to talk to in order to answer those research questions?
- What voice would you want to tease out of data?
- How long would you want to talk to them for?
- Step 3: How would you want to talk to them?
- PS: What is an /active/ user?
- Step 2 - Talk to: users and course organizers
- Step 3 - Both existing log data (to create user personas) and observation of individuals participation on the site (those who we think are representative of the personas)
- I would like to create a profile of an "active user" which we could pull from the database, so we can find a way to get a snapshot of "this number of people are engaged in P2PU right now"
- Triangulate the data
- PS: Why is someone creating a course?
- Step 2 - Talk to: users who created succesful courses
- Step 3 - Filter for successful courses, then interview course organizers
- AC: Where do users go when they finish a (their first) course?
- participants, dev team
- survey, can you follow users through clicks?
- you can track where a user "clicks" next, but only if they stay on P2PU - you could also pop up a little input field that asks "what's next"
- problem with surveys is that they pre-assume things, so you get limited responses.
- BK: how do we know if anyone has had fun? Or learnt anything?
- Step 2: Those participants who DON'T finish a course, their course organisers
- Step 3: Survey, exit interview,
- Why did we chose this method:
- AC: Is there a minimum group size (for successful learning **on P2PU**)?
- participants & organizers
- interviews with organizers, survey of participants
- JP: What needs to people have when they come to P2PU and how are they met or not met? Also how do their needs/wants change as they participate and become a part of the community?
- People who are on the periphery. Like why have they not joined in more?
- People who just want to learn about something specific. Does P2PU fulfill that need? Is that a need P2PU should fulfill better, or is our focus more on the community of peers?
- People who think we are jackasses.
- Case studies, survey
- BC these are the methods I've used in the past - open to new/better methods?
- MAK: what role P2PU is playing in the lives of independent learners. What value is it providing, and for whom?
- Everyone who has ever completed a P2PU course
- Everyone who has ever started but not finished a P2PU course
- I want at least some of the conversation to be in survey form with a constrained set of answers (so that there can be some crunching of numbers, and we can start to see trends).
- MAK: Do learners feel like they can ask questions as they are participating in P2PU, and who do they want to ask questions of?
- Everyone who has ever completed at P2PU course
- Everyone who has ever started but not finished a P2PU course
- Again, probably want this to be in survey form, but with the option for free text responses.
- Basically, I don't want to have to actually talk to anyone.
- I think it can be seductive to want to get qualitative data, and there is a risk that people will give the answers they THINK you want, becuase they want the answers to have "value"
- In a more anonymous survey-type method we might get more honest answers.
- Also, we may have the opportunity to get data on our entire population, rather than just a sample, and that's appealing.
- JB: How do people feel about p2pu
- someone who just heard about p2pu
- someone who had their first p2pu experience
- someone who met a p2pu community member f2f for the first time
- In person interview and record it
- DU: How do we measure success?
- Alumni that took courses 2+ years ago
- Course organizers
- PCK: How do learners make sense of their own identities in context?
- PCK: How do learners integrate feedback and reflection into what they do next?
- PCK: When do learners need assistance with planning their next step or learning experience?
- PCK: What feedback is most useful for learners? From whom, and when is it most useful?
- Philipp -> Question: I don't know about machine learning, can we use it?
- ie: can we design an algorythm that looks thorugh data on the site, to find something, and then "learns" to help extract better data
- PK -> it depends on how complex the information that you want it.
- JP -> I'm not a researcher, and I don't know how to design surveys - and it would be useful for me to get help on how to design a survey so that I don't bias things before they even go out.
- And I'd rather just tack my questions on to someone else's research than start my own.
- PS -> we probably have people in the community who have this experience and can help with this
- BK -> we probably all want the same stuff out of a "research project"
- VMG -> we are all doing research all the time, every time we ask people a question it's actually "research"
- VMG -> so what did you like about this activity
- PK -> I liked the diversity of questions that were surfaced
- PS -> I thought the questions were great, I'm a little frustrated though, becuase now I want to do this research, and I suspect that we might all run into the "not-enough-time, not-enough-expertise"
- MAK -> I think we need to start thinking about creating a survey. One big survey. Take all these questions, and start thinking about what a P2PU -wide survey would look like.
- Charlie: How is the School of Ed. doing? Point me to link if there's already a write-up. Thx!
- JP--> What's the purpose of this research? To present to the academic community?
- Yes, but also to improve in general.
Berlin Project Showcase
- Alex's Mentorship platform:
- School of Open