P2PU Community Call
16 May 2013
We're hanging out here: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/ffeae22c4a170ae0def9edc7ed3f7ef0ebb6e427?authuser=1&eid=110535027738331018997&hl=en Join us!
Attendees:
- Vanessa
- Bekka
- June
- Billy
- Leah
- Philipp
- karen
- Progress (what we've been working on)
- Hewlett Reporting
- Hewlett Proposal
- Better "Retention" through course design, group facilitation, etc.
- Badges Sprint 3
- Speaking, speaking, speaking: Confab, Mozilla OBI Call
- Planning our MOOC shop (and strategy meeting)
- Almost ready for Shuttleworth Foundation to arrive for their meeting
- School of ed Report - with designers
- Data policy draft (sent to CC and OKFN for expert eyes, awaiting feedback)
- Talking to June about data whitelist
- Hewlett Reporting
- Getting ready for Gentle introduction to Python IV
- new WYSIWYG editor (ckeditor)
- support for scheduling emails
- support for running multiple sequences
- Planning for bagdes
- support badges that are endorsed/approved by an organization
- integration with p2pu.org
- top level navigation
- Priorities (focus next week)
- Assessment Principles
- Understanding Mailgun for research
- Data Explorer Mission postdesign Survey
- Music Mooc Sample Course
- Badges UX for adding to P2PU (and user testing)
- BK:
- Privacy discussion
- Next phase of report design
- Travel logistics
- Getting a US Visa
- Newsletter
- Submit Hewlett proposal & report for previous Hewlett grant
- Some more stuff for Gentle introduction to pythin
- Problems (walls we ran into on the way)
- Finding reliable internet in Berlin :(
- Google Apps problems with Hangouts
- The upgrade seems to have messed up things for some @p2pu.org accounts
- We are hoping this will sort itself out over the next few days - if not, we'll have to investigate more
- Process (org stuff)
- What information / documentation to store about our projects, and where?
- Discourse, GDocs, Trello....
- We are pretty good keeping track of technical projects (mainly using Trello)
- Some other projects (data mission, etc.) are also on Trello (and we like that)
- Jane: Trello works great for task related projects, but there are other projects (e.g. SOO) for which they don't work
- We don't have an overview view at the moment
- Next step:
- Set up a place for all (funded?) projects - from there we can link to whatever tools people are using to manage their projects
Ideas (on the horizon)
- Copyright for GLAM - who is doing this? would be great for SOO!
- Me - bekka! That's what I thought!
- OKCon - September 2013 - I'm submitting a talk for SOO - someone from CC will give this if it gets accepted (<- Bekka)
- School of Open second round of facilitated courses - sign-up opens for two week period July 15, courses start at end of July or August (can vary by course facilitator)
Discussion
June's research
Discussion:
- June keeps referring to us as a "collective" - I like that (does the term have specific meaning in this context?)
- Organizers have a positive influence on level of discussion (what are they doing to achieve this? could it be done by "anyone" in the course - if given the right prompt?)
- H4: Number of organizer comments will be positively correlated to (a) number of active commenters and (b) avg. comments per commenter.
- Organizer comments were not correlated to the presence of more active commenters (H4a). However, organizer comments were positively related to more average contributions per commenter (H4b).
- https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12828081/haavind%20in%20JALN.pdf
- Haavind's research supports the Organizer getting out of the way as soon as possible--what are June's recommendations?
- Interaction prompts lead to higher rates of participation--what else can we do/recommendations for future courses? Would be interesting to cross this with School of Data mailgun data.
- Does organizer contribution attract more new contributors? (It wasn't clear to me)
- Do we know more about the relationship between active users and return visitors? Are the active users and the return users the same people? Or are there different active users within a larger group of return visitors each week?
- Given the huge differences between weekly activity levels, what are the reasons for those spikes?
- From the paper "For new joiners, having clear prompts in course pages is related to more active participation. For returning participants, more organizer activity promotes greater participant activity." - I would have assumed that new joiners primarily appear in the first week(s)? Is that not the case?
- Limitation of comparison across courses. Why didn't we provide P2PU usernames, which would have allowed this?
- Interested in looking at School of Webcraft challenges? (We have a draft report / that could be extended, expanded)
- June: There were questions about our analysis of "comments" - but comments were the only data we had.
- What data do we need to log in the future?
- I think we need to see where activity is taking place, and then think if/how to extract that data
- MECMOOC Data: Clickthroughs, messages to group (not all that rich)
- Karen F: One limitation (worth digging into) is that a lot of interaction happened outside of comments (people used twitter, other wikis, etc.) - A lot of these issues are similar to those we struggle with on participant formal assessment as well.
- Would love for this study to be carried out on SOO courses!
Course UX Feedback (via thread on the School of Open list, and this pad: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/school-of-open-course-feedback
Process
PS: How do we get better at compiling, discussing, prioritizing and then implementing these requests?
- Jane: In terms of process, let's spend some time complining feedback, and then do a call with everyone who cares and work through them
- VMG: I'd love to see a design brief / list of feature requests aligned with our dev sprints
[DRAFT] How we make decisions about which requests to address:
- How many people are affected? (is the issue generalizable, who benefits?)
- How much of a difference will it make to them? (fixes a super annoying issues, let's them do amazing new things)
- How much work is it?
- Do we have project funding aligned with this request? (this is not a requirement, but it makes it easier to address specific requests)
- Will it disprupt/limit other features currently being used?
- How aligned is it with our vision/mission broader goals?
Badges
- Awesome work! How can we also account for older, less tech-savvy, and formal course participants? eg. peers who are taking this to fulfill professional development training via Copyright 4 Educators. Suggested tweaks:
- Language on the site and when prompting people to fill in forms is fun, but may be a little too playful and trip up the experience for this type of audience. Can we make it more neutral to account for diverse, cultural and international, audiences?
- If some people are required/recommended to do this by their employers, we should make sure that it doesn't alienate them.
- Downside is that "neutral" ricks getting boring (We don't want to be described as boring) -> Not if you do it properly... Let's see examples. I'm not convinced. Google's messaging Is boring. No, microsoft is boring (MSFT is icky, Google is boring)
- Might look over the voice and tone guide that we all agreed upon and made to gauge what's in / what's out :)
- Critiques - suggest not requiring this field and focus on positive feedback and what might be improved instead. Maybe can still have this field, but not require it.
- What does this mean? Please say more. I think Delia meant the "concerns" field.. her concern was that people want to feel encouraged, so should always frame feedback in a positive way. maybe just a dif way of wording that and also make it optional to fill in (dunno if it is already- then not an issue).
- Need to have capability where only creator can issue badge. This is important for any course facilitators associated with orgs/institutions/gov'ts (eg. National Copyright Unit of AU, CC) - S of Ed has had requests for this as well.
- Dirk Erika and I discussed this. We're putting together a logic model for you. Yay!
- Make more clear to badge owner all the little steps they need to take to make sure they can issue badge, eg. check email for badge email, then do, etc.
- Overall: want the platform to allow for all different types of badge creation - whether playful or more formal - by neutralizing language.
Course UX suggestions
- Disqus - Ability to turn Disqus on and off, or some other way of making clear to participants that they shouldn't use it for a particular course
- Question:Did you find that Disqus worked as well as the old (single log on) comments? No. The old challenge comments really work well... continue to eg. for Get CC Savvy
- Is there a Django app for threaded discussions that is well maintained? The upside of disqus is that we don't have to worry about it (at all). The downside is that they made design changes over the past 6 months that we didn't like very much.
- Enable collaborative course development - how can we do this via course ux with multliple organizers? eg. revision history?
- Revision information is stored, but not displayed atm. I think it would be useful to show.
- 1st easy step would be showing a list of authors
- 2nd step, showing history of edits
- Archiving course pages - how can we archive pages we don't use for any reason?
- Deleting pages arhives them, do you need them again afterwards? Yes - if we need them how can organizer still access them? From their POV it's gone - poof!
- Draft course pages - can we save course pages as drafts for use later? eg. Tumblr and blogs allow for this.
- Scheduling for different timezones - using external tools to schedule stuff, is there way to integrate?
- don't know, would be interesting to hear what other people use. Maybe there's something that gives you an iframe to embed?
- Sounds good. Doodle does this well. It would be useful, but I am worried that this is actually much harder to do properly than it seems. I'd rather use external services.
- P2PU course running on a dif platform - how can we still be part of P2PU and/or School of Open but point people else where for the actual course? eg. handle sign-up and initial course communication via P2PU but would be more of a splash page that goes somewhere else. Right now with disqus and everything - it confuses people where the course is running, even if we try to make clear in text.
- We can list courses running on a different platform Yeah - the list isn't ideal bc then course sign-ups, initial communication isn't handled. and also, less evident why this is part of p2pu - but should be, esp if we are encouraging folks to leverage the web!
- One thing to work through (needs more thinking) is how we handle sign-ups. Is there value in still supporting sign-up through P2PU, or just link out.
- Announcements - no history of sent messages. ability to look back on what we sent to who. currently an empty box you type into.. don't know where it's going, how it's formatted, what the "from" or "subject" field will look like.
- The fact that the #hashtag field in "Settings" feeds into the subject line of "Announcements" is not obvious. What else does it do? We would prefer to have the course name (without a #, and with the ability to use spaces) in the subject line -- or, ideally, just generic control over the subject line. Agreed: 20 characters makes for a very short subject line, and not being able to use spaces is tricky.
- Accounting for people who sign up after we send out initial announcement? Maybe announcement could have ability to auto-send a customized greeting to new students when they enroll.
- Email addresses are the only way that makes sense -- so how to get them as course facilitators while abiding by privacy policy, etc. - as new students sign up as well. Do we go through Dirk each and every time?
- Also - with emails we have no username/identity to attach to them the current way we get them. Would be good to have a list of the course participants.
- +1 from School of Ed - This was been a consistent need/challenge for us over the last two years.
- would improved announcements solve the need for email addresses? possibly - depending on how improved! but keep in mind email addresses are also used for splitting people up into small groups and discussion and questions, not just announcements
- People page - the main piece of information facilitators seek is the username and total enrollment number. How to make these clear.
- Not quite clear what it means to "Follow" someone or to be "Followed".
- Brief explanations around certain form fields - Confused by non-English on the Settings page - Gearchiveerd, Gesloten? Also not sure what "rolling term" means in this context - perhaps some text to clarify? Same with most metadata fields- perhaps a brief explanation of what these terms mean and how the data will be used.
- Text editing
- Markup isn't entirely intuitive for newbies. Can we have some notes for people or a preface with tips? Didn't realize for a while that moving text around while editing text wouldn't automatically update the footnote order - so ended up with wrong citations attached to text during course development. Perhaps a note to users to this effect.
- + 1 (even for me :)
- +1 I asked about this a while ago, am willing to make up a cheat sheet (other than the one linked to in the "editing" mode)
- An edit button at the top as well as bottom of each page would be greatly appreciated, for work on longer pages requring extensive edits.
- I think an earlier mockup had this. +1
- If the "Start Course" button were visible in the first screen it would not be necessary to add a sentence explaining to people where to click to sign up for the course.
- Titles in the course boxes get cut off -- would be nice if it didn't!
- +1 Ha, this person has a sense of humor. sorry - that was me! (jane)
- P2PU doesn't work with older versions explorer. Make sure course ux works in all standard browsers - not just Chrome and Firefox (the open ones).
- This is tricky - takes a lot of work, for very little pay-off. Our community is a Chrome/Firefox community. And (almost) everyone is able to use those browsers. Maybe we should improve messaging around this -> "Hey, it appears you're browser isn't supported here. You can upgrade for free to a newer version of .... "
- But our community isn't just chrome/firefox. educators and older people (lifelong learners) use explorer, safari, etc! esp if they are taking the course using their institution's computer
- Interface doesn't make it clear what will happen with future ux or tools. eg. the challenge ux just went away
- Course support toolkit or resource - Allison had developed one (or several) but can't find it after searches through old wiki and archive.p2pu.org. Where is this so we can adapt and update?
- should this be on help.p2pu.org? or is it an old course?
- How do you clone a course?
- not implemented atm for the new UX
- Q from DU: how do you run a course again?
- Is the old cloning feature working now?
- No
- We'll do it manually - copy paste stuff over for now. but would be good if this was enabled bc we'll be running many instances of several courses
DU / Question - There are cool courses we don't know about. Do we want to do something about this?
Randow question: Is the "old" (last) P2PU system going away anytime?
- We should definiely "archive" it somewhere before it goes away... (helps with the research side of things etc.). We (at UMD) might be able to help with storing past iterations if you are interested
- School of Ed is still using it...so let us know if it's goign away at any point
- School of Open is still using all the challenges - as part of our current courses! please let us know if this happens ahead of time so we can do something about our popular challenges like Get CC Savvy