= School of Open Course Review Process =
Getting your course featured at http://schoolofopen.org

1. Share a link to your draft course on the School of Open discussion list: https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open. (You can also ask the P2PU community list: http://groups.google.com/group/p2pu-community/. )
2. Based on feedback from your peers, iterate and improve.
3. Seek the final reviews of two School of Open organizers -- one from  Creative Commons and one from P2PU. (Obtain the reviews openly on the discussion list.)
4. Incorporate organizers' feedback and publish. (Follow up on the discussion list.)

An organizer will add your course once it has undergone the review process. You can read the community's rationale behind the course review process below.

= School of Open Course Review Rationale =
This is the rationale behind the course review process as reached by the community.

The School of Open is foremost a community initiative, with courses being built by both individuals and organizations across the various “open” movements. No one organization claims responsibility or endorsement of all School of Open courses. The School aims to support existing education efforts within these “open” movements via the courses they create as part of the School of Open, and each course will be clearly identified with its creator. 
 
In addition to building and facilitating courses, collaborating organizations and individuals will collect feedback and improve their courses through community review (process outlined below). Moreover, all School of Open courses are licensed by default under CC BY-SA, the default P2PU platform license, so iterative improvements are encouraged and shared back with the community, in addition to being freely and legally available to all. 
 
In collaboration with the School of Open community, the following course review process has been outlined for the School. This process will be implemented in stages, and will remain flexible for future iteration as the community’s needs shift and grow. 
 
Background
 
Work-flow approval processes are already in place for all P2PU Schools; only the School’s organizer may designate a course as being part of that School. Furthermore, only the School’s organizer or P2PU administrator may make any changes to the design or layout of the School’s webpage. These technical measures prevent any course from being added to a School without the organizer’s approval. The School of Open’s organizers currently include staff from CC and P2PU, in addition to volunteers affiliated with the University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan initiative. 
 
1) Process
 
In order for a course to be published as part of the School of Open, it must have undergone review and incorporated the feedback of two or more School of Open organizers. Since the School of Open is a joint initiative being coordinated by CC and P2PU, one organizer from each organization must review and provide feedback before the course can be added to the School of Open webpage. Furthermore, this review must take place openly and transparently (e.g. on a public mailing list or the course platform) so that the community may have ample opportunity to engage with course organizers and give feedback for improvement prior to a decision. Additional parties, such as content or domain experts, may be pulled into review a course on a case-by-case basis. This process does not apply to draft or in-development courses which are clearly noted as such on the School of Open page. 
 
Reviews will take place in the context of a set of evolving, community created guidelines for what is and is not a School of Open course at http://pad.p2pu.org/p/school-of-open-guidelines. As the School of Open grows, these guidelines may morph into a set of published standards; as the project currently stands, the community agrees that the recommended guidelines are flexible enough to meet the needs of a course review process and to serve as initial guidance for new course creators seeking to join the School.
 
The community agrees that the course review process must remain flexible and lightweight, at the same that it recognizes a number of ways that courses can be vetted and endorsed that won’t hold up the logistical process of creating and publishing them. These additional methods are outlined in the following sections.

2) Design
 
As mentioned above, the School of Open webpage will make clear that no one organization or entity endorses or owns all courses, but rather that courses are created by various members of the community. This will be implemented through:

• Clear explanations and descriptive text
• Visible markers associating courses with specific organizations. For example, any course CC creates will be visibly marked as being created by CC, while any course that Open.Michigan creates will be visibly marked as being created by Open.Michigan.
• Individually created and run courses will not carry these markers and it will be clear that they are not associated with any organization.

 
3) Community 
 
As noted above, the community will have the opportunity to give feedback as part of the course review process. In addition, P2PU may implement platform-wide community review tools in the future. As part of P2PU, the School of Open will integrate these and any other tools in collaboration with the larger P2PU community. For example, P2PU may implement a tool whereby a course may be rated for quality by the community. The School of Open will explore these and similar activities with the P2PU community, to ensure sustainability of any School-specific processes or features on the P2PU platform. These features will not serve as barriers to course creation, but will be essential for the continued improvement of courses and participation and ownership by the community.   

Some things to note:

• Of course, outside of the School of Open, anyone can still create and publish a course at P2PU at anytime. All P2PU terms and community norms still apply to anything on their site/platform.
• The measures outlined above will be implemented in stages in collaboration with the larger P2PU community. Currently, only 1) is immediately implementable; 2) and 3) will require future work. 
• This course review process will be documented and made transparent on the School of Open web site (this pad).

= FEEDBACK on the course review process above = 

• Add your comment, suggested change here... or if you're comfortable, edit directly above!
• How should we mark courses that we create (Design)?
• piet: one issue I see with the review process is that a course organizer has  no idea where to go from this point, including when to promote it, how  long to wait for feedback from the community or from P2PU/CC organizers,  etc.