2013-06-06

Parking Lot:
* More ruthless how we use our time/resources (prove demand first)

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From the blog:

• 2012 - http://info.p2pu.org/2012/08/16/future-of-lernanta/
• 2013 - http://info.p2pu.org/2013/01/08/our-technology-plan-in-a-post-mayan-era/

How are we doing?

• Overall, roughly on track
• Course UX
• Badges
• Mech MOOC
• Internationalization

Things we haven't done yet

• home page
• schools
• course index / course discovery

Where's the MOOC going (growing)

• Simplicity
  • Original idea was to keep it super lightweight
  • Retain original focus on simplicity (only add things if they are absolutely needed)
• Email grouping
  • Differenet needs for different courses
  • Haven't "nailed" grouping - only some groups really work
• Improve CSS a little (esp. front-page and CSS over-rides in HTML pages)

Difference between MOOC and P2PU course UX

• MOOCs and Courses are starting to share similar features
• We want them to remain different
• MOOCs
  • Stand-alone (not part of Lernanta)
    • Let's us do experiments easily
  • Lightweight (sign-up is easy)
  • Main mode of interaction is email
  • Easy to point people to other services on the web
  • Users don't become part of a larger P2PU community
• Analytics. YES, please.
  • document what mailgun captures and how to interpret / analyze it
    • how to use tags
  • track more / other user activity if we need
  • avoid building dashboards
  • maybe small utility for getting csv from mailgun if it's not possible via mailgun

New tools we are using: 

• discourse

What's next?

• home page, deeper learning if we get funding, python mooc going strong, badges
• Follow up blog post from the January post
  • Here is what we said we would do
  • Here is what we already did
  • Here is some other stuff we did
  • Here is what we're going to do next

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Things we are busy with (priorities)

• API
• Modularisation
• CSS framework
• Style guide
• Courses (creation, simplification)
• Then 
  • Assessment & badges

Things we discussed

• Course creators should receive more attention

Things we decided

• Simplify our current offering

Ideas

• More remixing
• Etherpads
• Disqus

Overall direction (communicate to dev and community list)

Our technology supports people who make learning happen

Who are these mysterious folks? Broadly, they create opportunities for others to learn. By the way, this doesn't mean we don't want our technology to support the learners themselves, quite the contrary. We think that making course builders happy is the best way to make learning awesome and everybody happy.

Most members of the core P2PU community create courses (consisting of content and a group of people learning together, typically with a facilitator). That model will remain our cornerstone for the foreseeable future. 

But there are a million other ways that people can learn with each other and we want to enable more of them. In order to do that we partner with people who want to build technology that goes way beyond the course model. We started making our core technology more modular to make it easier for these folks to expand it, and we are planning events and outreach to grow a community of technologists around P2PU.

What this means:

Homepage

• We want to more clearly communicate that learning at P2PU happens in many different ways and that there is an amazing community of course builders and innovators building this thing. In addition to featuring courses, we plan to use our home page to better promote lab projects that are ready for use. We will also showcase new ideas coming from the community, and make it easier to get involved. P2PU.org will be your entry point to a variety of learning opportunities and your pathway into the community.
• Next steps:
  • Prepare a wireframe / proposal for feedback from the community.
  • If you have specific ideas for this, please share them on the list for discussion, or contact dirk@p2pu.org directly.

Core platform & apps

• A set of core features & services that we provide. Currently this includes: Profiles, Courses, Course list, Achievements & Badges, and Schools.
• Next steps:
  • Improve and simplify the course experience (collapse courses, study groups, challenges into one model that keeps the best features and gets rid of everything else).
  • Modularize the underlying architecture, so that different parts speak to each other through clearly defined interfaces that can be opened up as public APIs in the future.

Lab projects

• This is our space to experiment with new tools. Some built by us. Most built by our awesome community. Things that work, will be more centrally supported and potentially rolled into the platform. The API built by Jose, Alex K's Mentoring@P2PU and the Mechanical MOOC are first examples of great lab projects.
• Next steps:
  • Make it easier to expand the platform: roll out the API (and expand it), provide a CSS style guide that makes it easier to build lab projects with the P2PU look & feel, etc.

Where we are at?

Where we would like to be?

How are we planning on getting there?

How can you help?