Building a toolkit for open educators

CC-BY-SA Nick Farnhill

At the start of this year we sketched out a rough tech roadmap. Now is a good time to report on some of the work we’ve done since then, and our plans for the rest of the year.

One big shift we made is to move away from thinking of P2PU as one big software platform that everybody has to come to. Instead we broke out the individual pieces as a set of tools for open educators that can be combined in different ways.  Think of it as building with (software) Lego rather than puzzle pieces that only work in one exact combination.

You can read more about our original thoughts here.

The tools at your disposal.

So at this moment there are a range of tools for an open educator to use!

• Courses for peer learning.
• Badges for driving feedback and recognition.
• Discussion for talking to like minded people.
• The Mechanical MOOC for running large scale unplatformed MOOCs.
• Etherpads for collaborative authoring and note taking.
• Our blog for telling stories.

There are also technical tools that is useful if you are an edutech hacker:

• P2PU’s CSS framework to quickly create new tools that looks great.
• Marvin, our friendly robotic sysadmin.

The nitty-gritty, or how we got there:

• We employed Marvin to improve the process for maintaining our servers.
• Added LRMI metadata to courses for search engines to gather rich data about courses and you to find them!
• Used the revised course UX to launch the first set of School of Open courses.
• Developed badges.p2pu.org from the ground up to allow anyone to create a badge and get awesome feedback on projects they care about.
• Implemented OAuth on p2pu.org to safe you from Yet Another Username & Password when logging into badges.p2pu.org.
• Scaled the Mechanical MOOC to run the Learning Creative Learning MOOC with over 24,000 signups.
• Rewired the Mechanical MOOC for the first Data Exploration Mission.
• Added and updated some translations.
• Deployed discourse to facilitate high quality conversations in our community!

What we are planning next!

• Revamp the home page to show the full landscape of things going on at P2PU.
• Tweak badges after some real world usage and feedback.
• Evolve the Mechanical MOOC to run other awesome MOOCs like the Music MOOC and the Writing MOOC.
• Build tools to strengthen group collaboration for courses and MOOCs.
• Work on the course index to help finding great courses on P2PU.
• Improve analytics to capture the relevant data our researchers need to tell us how we can do better.

How to get involved?

• Looking to design a Badge? Create one at badges.p2pu.org.
• Want to run a course? Join “How do I make a P2PU course” to get the pro tips.
• Do you speak a foreign language? Help out with translation.
• Do you have loads of good ideas? Join the conversation at thepeople.p2pu.org.
• Want to build a piece of P2PU? Talk to us at thepeople.p2pu.org.