research-article

Open Education in the Wild: The Dynamics of Course Production in the Peer 2 Peer University

Authors:

Brian S. ButlerAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

Pages 1896 - 1905

https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675292

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online, open education platform where any user can create a course, contribute content, or join an existing course as a learner. P2PU represents an experiment in organizing the production of entirely user-generated, open education. However, the open model of P2PU rests on the critical assumption that members can successfully coordinate and produce a sufficient supply of courses and motivate others to join in. In this paper, we use log data from P2PU to describe the dynamics of organizers -- members who try to produce and launch open courses -- and explore the factors related to their ability to successfully create courses on this open platform. We find that a critical predictor of successful course development is quickly finding like-minded organizers to collaborate with, suggesting that creating new education systems based on open, social computing platforms requires facilitation of key aspects of social coordination beyond providing platform and content resources.

References

[1]

Abelson, H. The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT. Journal of Science Education and Technology 17, 2 (2008), 164--174.

[2]

Ahn, J., Butler, B., Weng, C., and Webster, S. Learning to be a better q'er in social q&a sites: Social norms and information artifacts. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), (2013).

Digital Library

[3]

Ahn, J., Butler, B.S., Alam, A., and Webster, S.A. Learner Participation and Engagement in Open Online Courses: Insights from the Peer 2 Peer University. Journal of Online Learning & Teaching 9, 2 (2013).

[4]

Ahn, J., Weng, C., and Butler, B.S. The Dynamics of Open, Peer-to-Peer Learning: What Factors Influence Participation in the P2P University? Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), IEEE (2013), 3098--3107.

Digital Library

[5]

Bernard, R.M., Abrami, P.C., Borokhovski, E., et al. A meta-analysis of three types of interaction treatments in distance education. Review of Educational Research 79, 3 (2009), 1243--1289.

[6]

Bruckman, A. Learning in online communities. The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, (2006), 461--472.

[7]

Burke, M., Joyce, E., Kim, T., Anand, V., and Kraut, R. Introductions and requests: Rhetorical strategies that elicit response in online communities. In Communities and Technologies 2007. Springer, 2007, 21--39.

[8]

Butler, B., Joyce, E., and Pike, J. Don't Look Now, but We've Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2008), 1101--1110.

Digital Library

[9]

Butler, B., Kiesler, S., and Kraut, R. Community Effort in Online Groups: Who Does the Work and Why? Leadership at a distance: Research in technologicallysupported work, (2013), 171.

[10]

Butler, B.S. and Ahn, J. Ecological perspectives on creating and sustaining open learning environments. Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Workshop on CSCW and Education, ACM (2013).

[11]

Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J., and Wiggins, A. Free/Libre Open-source Software Development: What We Know and What We Do Not Know. ACM Comput. Surv. 44, 2 (2008), 7:1--7:35.

Digital Library

[12]

Forte, A. and Bruckman, A. Scaling consensus: Increasing decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual, IEEE (2008), 157--157.

Digital Library

[13]

Gennarelli, V. Personal Communication. 2014. http://www.slideshare.net/VanessaGennarelli/designresearch-course-creation.

[14]

Haythornthwaite, C. Crowds and communities: Light and heavyweight models of peer production. System Sciences, 2009. HICSS'09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on, IEEE (2009), 1--10.

Digital Library

[15]

Howison, J., Wiggins, A., and Crowston, Kevin. Validity issues in the use of social network analysis with digital trace data. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 12, 12 (2011), 767--797.

[16]

Jenkins, H. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press, 2009.

[17]

Kafai, Y.B. and Peppler, K.A. Beyond small groups: New opportunities for research in computersupported collective learning. Proceedings of the 9th Conference of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, (2011).

[18]

Kirschner, P.A. and van Merriënboer, J.J.G. Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education. Educational Psychologist 48, 3 (2013), 169--183.

[19]

Knox, J. Five critiques of the Open Educational Resources movement. Teaching in Higher Education 18, 8 (2013), 821--832.

[20]

Kraut, R., Wang, X., Butler, B., Joyce, E., and Burke, M. Beyond information: Developing the relationship between the individual and the group in online communities. Information Systems Research, (under review).

[21]

Maloney-Krichmar, D. and Preece, J. A multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 12, 2 (2005), 201--232.

Digital Library

[22]

Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., and Hartmann, B. Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, (2011), 2857--2866.

Digital Library

[23]

McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., and Cormier, D. The MOOC model for digital practice. 2010.

[24]

Pappano, L. Massive Open Online Courses Are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace. The New York Times, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massi ve-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapidpace.html.

[25]

Peter, S. and Deimann, M. On the role of openness in education: A historical reconstruction. Open Praxis 5, 1 (2013), 7--14.

[26]

Preece, J. and Shneiderman, B. The Reader-toLeader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction 1, 1 (2009), 13--32.

[27]

Quinn, A.J. and Bederson, B.B. Human computation: a survey and taxonomy of a growing field. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (2011), 1403--1412.

Digital Library

[28]

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., et al. Scratch: programming for all. Communications of the ACM 52, 11 (2009), 60--67.

Digital Library

[29]

Rotman, D., Preece, J., Hammock, J., et al. Dynamic Changes in Motivation in Collaborative Citizenscience Projects. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM (2012), 217--226.

Digital Library

[30]

Seely Brown, J. and Adler, R.P. Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. Educause review 43, 1 (2008), 16--20.

[31]

Uys, D. Personal communication. 2014.

[32]

Wiggins, A. and Crowston, K. From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science. 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), (2011), 1--10.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ahn JErickson I(2016)Revealing mutually constitutive ties between the information and learning sciencesThe Information Society10.1080/01972243.2016.113049632:2(81-84)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1080/01972243.2016.1130496
Larsen MLarsen M(2016)Transnational Programs and Providers: Mobilities and Complex Spatial FlowsInternationalization of Higher Education10.1057/978-1-137-53345-6_7(123-150)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2016
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53345-6_7

Index Terms

Open Education in the Wild: The Dynamics of Course Production in the Peer 2 Peer University
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction paradigms

Recommendations

Engaging with open education
WikiSym '10: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

This panel will address key issues and provide empirically-grounded insights on learning about, with, and through open educational resources (OER). Open educational resources are educational materials that are freely shared by those who seek to learn ...
Design Principles for Collaboration Platforms for Open Education
CSEDU 2015: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However,...
Instructional Design Models to support Collaborative Open Books for Open Education
Interacción '14: Proceedings of the XV International Conference on Human Computer Interaction

The recent open education movement, with its most visible aspect, the MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses), brought a wide discussion regarding the potential and threats that this model could represent to traditional education, being on classroom or ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

February 2015

1956 pages

ISBN:9781450329224

DOI:10.1145/2675133

General Chairs:
Dan Cosley
Cornell University, USA
,
Andrea Forte
Drexel University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Luigina Ciolfi
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
,
David McDonald
University of Washington, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 February 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

CSCW '15

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CSCW '15: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

March 14 - 18, 2015

BC, Vancouver, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

October 18 - 22, 2025

Bergen , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
207
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)5
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ahn JErickson I(2016)Revealing mutually constitutive ties between the information and learning sciencesThe Information Society10.1080/01972243.2016.113049632:2(81-84)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1080/01972243.2016.1130496
Larsen MLarsen M(2016)Transnational Programs and Providers: Mobilities and Complex Spatial FlowsInternationalization of Higher Education10.1057/978-1-137-53345-6_7(123-150)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2016
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53345-6_7

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents