First P2PU Board Meeting
P2PU registered in California earlier this year, and held its first full board meeting in early May. We were very excited to appoint 8 board directors, including new appointees Cathy Casserly (ED Creative Commons) and Mark Surman (ED Mozilla Foundation). The meeting was fun and super productive. We’ll be looking to add someone (or two) with business expertise in the future.
A new P2PU.org
We launched our beta site at http://new.p2pu.org in late April, but started moving users onto it during May. It’s a slight reboot of the learning model to allow more flexibility – not all courses have to start at the same time, and we also encourage creation of more self-organized study groups in addition to courses. We also changed some of the terminology, and are pushing the peer learning angle more strongly, so that users don’t fall into the old model of expecting to teach or be taught. We also put in some groundwork to prepare the migration in June, but more on that soon.
Better support
We also did a lot of thinking about how to better support our users. We are still not 100% happy, but the combination of redesigned P2PU Handbook, and Q&A site, works much better than what we had before. The new P2PU Handbook is part resources (screencasts, tutorials) and part community support forum. And we set up an open Q&A site for any question that might come up at http://qa.p2pu.org. Both are monitored by the core community. And the newsletter now focuses on promotion of new courses and study groups as they are created.
Badges Grow Up
The interest in an open badges infrastructure has been overwhelming, and we are transitioning that project to sit more centrally within Mozilla. P2PU will be the pilot implementation for the badge issuer functionality. We also continue to help drive and promote the ideas and are part of the advisory group, but it frees up some of our resources to focus back on our core challenges at P2PU.
Hiring An Army
Ok, I am exaggerating. But we are growing and hiring, and the interview process is taking up a lot of time. The positions we are filling are a P2PU product manager, who will take over much of the platform development work from Philipp; a product manager for School of Webcraft (which is a Mozilla position, but will co-report to Mozilla and P2PU), and two assessment related positions (an assessment specialist and an assessment developer) to drive our Hewlett work forward. And in the community we are discussing the principles that can guide our compensation and hiring process in the future.