Priorities for P2PU: Our Strategic Plan


pic by Karen Fasimpaur CC BY

pic by Karen Fasimpaur CC BY

Over the last few months we’ve been reflecting a lot on who we are and what we do.  At our annual face-to-face meeting in 2013, we took some time to refine this – think about what we’re good at, what’s been working for our community, and what we want to do next.

Since then, we’ve committed our thinking to paper, punted it around the office, asked members of our community for feedback, and got sign-off from our board. Now we want to share it with you, and so we invite you all to view the  newly minted P2PU strategic plan.

Let us know your thoughts This is definitely an ongoing conversation, and we would love to hear your thoughts.  What does P2PU mean to you? What do you think about our ideas for the future? Opinions, suggestions, questions and ideas all welcome; the discussion is ongoing on our forums; please join us there.

The short version In essence, we’ll be bringing a renewed focus to the things that have got us this far – talking about peer-driven, online learning as widely as possible; building showcases to inspire others to create great peer-learning experiences; and sharing know-how around the community.  We want to be the hub of an expertise community – not just dispensing our wisdom but sharing lessons learned around a collaborative community of peer-educators.  

What will change?

Keeping what works – we are not planning any grand rebuilding of P2PU, nor any sharp swerve in a new direction. We are announcing a renewed commitment to ensuring all the projects we work on offer great opportunities to learn something new about open online peer-learning, or to spread such learning around.  And – most importantly – we promise to report back.    We will continue to do interesting experiments (like our Webcraft challenges, Python MOOC, or Play With Your Music course), but want to get better at sharing the lessons we’ve learned. We’ll continue to work on many fronts to build the wider community of peer learners and peer-learning.

Keeping what works – In many ways, it’s business as usual – as noted above, we’re talking a renewed focus, not a big change in direction. We’ll continue to partner with great collaborators to build interesting and novel peer-learning experiences (watch this space!). We’ll continue to work on many fronts to build the wider community of peer learners and peer-learning advocates.

More content – you can also expect to see new additions to our website in coming months, as we beef up the knowledge-sharing aspects of our website. You may have noticed our publication rate rising rapidly in recent weeks; expect more new content like this in coming months, along with some re-organising of the website.

From building a platform, to showing how it’s done – we’ve decided creating and maintaining a unique, all-in-one course platform isn’t the best way to spread the idea that anyone can learn anything they like, using online resources and peer learners.  Expect to see it replaced by new, improved course-hosting ideas in the latter half of the year.  This doesn’t mean we’ll be abandoning current and past users of our course platform.  We will continue to host existing content.  There will be clear migration paths for existing users of our platform (one-click, or as close to one-click as possible) to more flexible P2PU solutions. As a result, we hope to see more innovation in how our community designs and hosts courses.  We will also be hosting a new course on how to build and deliver online peer-learning experiences, alongside a ‘course-in-a-box’ resource to help you do it. Rest assured, P2PU will remain a place where those looking to create courses can find a solution.  We just plan on doing it in a different way.

So what now? Three years on and we think it’s a great time to be looking at the bigger picture – ‘what are we doing?’, not just ‘what are we doing next?’. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this – join the ongoing conversation at The People.  And if you haven’t explored our site in a while – do so now! Remind yourself what resources are already out there to help you build great peer-learning experiences.  Build a course using our Mechanical MOOC tool.  Integrate badges into your learning community. Work with us to integrate peer-learning design into your next online course.  If there’s things you want to see on our site, tell us on our forums. We’re looking forward to the year ahead.

 



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