 to this forum, I'm David Theogoldo, the Director of the Dixie Humanities Research Institute at the post-organization for this. It's an enormous pleasure to welcome Philip Schmidt to talk to us today. Philip, most of you will know, as the co-founder and now Director of the Peer to Peer University. He's living in Cape Town of all places. My hometown is over to you, to know that and knowing from this. And he has worked on education and development in Southern Africa. He has worked in the past for Accenture in France. He's a computer scientist by training. And has been part of the UN University of America program and has worked for the University of the Western Cape Town in setting up programs for them. And is involved with the MacArthur Foundation Initiative, Indigenous Media and Learning on us. He's involved in conversations and the Mazzata Foundation and the Firefox books. Really designing a badging system for certifying community-based knowledge formation. And he's here to talk to us today about Peer to Peer University. So please join me in welcoming Philip. There will be comments on his talks by Gary Matkin, who's the Dean of Continuing Education here at UC Irvine. Gary is here, it's a great pleasure to have him here. And Bill Mara, who's the Director of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. I'm just kidding, I'm right here. And a colleague of ours, and a colleague of mine. Welcome Philip. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here today. Thanks for inviting me today. Because without UC Irvine, Peer to Peer University might still exist, but it wouldn't have got to where it is as quickly. And we've had a long relationship with Gary and Larry in the open course where work who's kind of helped us get started and incubated the project actually at some point, when it was just an idea that a few people had who were all over the world and didn't quite know what was gonna happen with this idea. So I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about the context in which Peer to Peer University was, it became an idea for us and then went from an idea to a project. Some of the changes that are happening in the world of higher education that we are seeing and then talk a little bit about what Peer to Peer University is and how it works and who's involved and how the courses work. And then I've mentioned a few areas that we are really interested in at the moment, including bad certification, but almost more like questions and presenting you with the thoughts that we have. And then I'm hoping that we can have a conversation about that more than me kind of just talking about Peer to Peer University. So I think the fundamental kind of situation is I and the people who started Peer to Peer University saw us that there was this amazing moment of opportunity right now in higher education. And that opportunity is a mix of three things. It's really, it brings together the formal education environment with the open web and I'll talk a little bit about what that means in my end. And the informal learning environment that we now have a chance to actually bring those together in a much more creative way, leverage the strengths of the different pieces and really see some pretty, I think amazing changes in how high education is working. So I think the current model, I mean I've worked at the university in Cape Town where probably the situation is very different from UCI, but I do believe that there are some similarities that kind of resonate in both places. And I think that we have kind of reason to believe that there are certain things that are fundamentally wrong with the model of higher education that we, as we have practiced it in, let's say the last 100 years, maybe kind of building on the football university and then the kind of more, the drive of the industrial development and the kind of strategic role that the university has played in workplace, workforce development, et cetera. And I think the reason why we're a little bit stuck is because of this concept of the Iron Triangle. The model that we have now, it's difficult to move any of these three pieces without affecting the other two. So if we are trying to break down costs, it affects quality and access generally. If we try to increase access, the other two are affected. And we kind of stuck with it. We're trying to make all of them more accessible, lower cost and higher quality and it doesn't quite work. And I think it's for structural reasons that that doesn't quite work. I think it's obvious that if we look at the demand for higher education, I mean UC Irvine is a great example with the huge impacts of foreign students. I think it's obvious that if we look at Asia and South America, the number of young people who are going to be looking for higher education in the next 10 or 20 years, there's no way that we can build enough brick and mortar universities. And not even supply them with educational opportunities using distance learning because there simply aren't enough teachers in the way that the current model works to teach all these students. I'm going to speak a little bit about the quality aspect here, which is related to learning. And then I'll come back to that in a minute. I think cost and access are pretty self-explanatory. So talking about the quality aspect, it's someone actually at the DNL conference used this metaphor and approach for interesting. He said, the way we think about education is like that we're preparing for a hibernation, like we have bear who's preparing for a hibernation. We try to eat as much as possible in a really short defined period of time. And then we kind of don't eat for a really long time. So we go to university and we have to cram all this knowledge into our heads. And then we go out into the world. We work for 10, 20 years and it's disconnected. I think in today's world that's just, that's first of all it's changing and second of all people are really struggling. Even if I look, I mean, I've studied computer science. There's almost nothing I learned in terms of technical skills in my university experience that is still relevant to them. So there are certain practices of working in collaboration and kind of an approach to being a computer scientist that's still very valid. But a lot of the things I have to constantly upgrade. And then secondly, still in the quality of learning space, there's, I think we know that new skills are needed. Some people have 21st century skills where people want to be more of a digital literacy. But the way we are teaching is still very much stuck in a structure where people are not encouraged to collaborate with each other. The dectrism, it's a very rigid lecture structure where people are expected to sit in a chair for 15 minutes and listen to someone talk about it to the end. The situation in a place like UC Irvine might be different where more people have access to small seminars and more interactive experiences. But that is an absolute luxury for the majority of people in higher education. So, we must forget that most people sit in row, a team of some lecture or listen to someone speak in the front. And taking that kind of learning experience where there's a lot of new ways that people learn that is not perfect in the institution to the certification, I think the same is true for certification. We still have the same kind of degree that we've had for decades, at best, I would argue, give some implied statement about someone's abilities because it is such a summary, right? So, I get one piece of paper that is supposed to tell you about my at least four-year-long experience of learning and students and my abilities. And the best, I think we do in most cases, we associate it with the branch of the university and we just assume, well, he's an Oxford man, but often we get it wrong, and the Oxford man experience, you know, not exactly what we expected, or maybe the Oxford brand isn't, now, it's maybe to pick on a UK institution here because I'm in the United States. If I was there, I would do it the other way around. But, so, I think that, like, basically, I think the certifications also still suck in this whole model. I think it's useful to look at what has changed, and the changes, I would argue, are dramatic. Not so much in high education, but outside of high education, and then look at what are the opportunities that that creates. So, one is content is free. The digitization of content, there's a downwards push towards free that is almost impossible to resist. People have tried all kinds of business models to deal with open and free content. The reality is once it's out of the box, it's very difficult to put it back into the box, and I think the textbook publishers are the latest industry that is experiencing that at the moment. And then secondly, we've seen that people are able to self-organize in incredibly sophisticated ways to create an amazing knowledge product. So Wikipedia is one example of open source software. There are many dozens of other examples in the arts in summits where these online communities seemingly unregulated. They actually are highly regulated, but the regulation comes from within more than is pre-designed from outside. People work together, they put in a lot of time, they put in a lot of expertise. They often outperform the encumbered, so Wikipedia quality in some areas outperforms inside the media of Tanika or at least as I think the nature study included that they are equally incorrect in most fields. And so we have this, we see this incredible collaborative spirit that's happening online and the kind of the raw materials of education, which I would say of content are becoming clear. Kind of what I just used two examples for that. So one is, UC Irvine has an open course where I picked the MIT video because I wasn't sure which video they wanted me to show, but the amazing thing is not that this video is available online, the amazing thing is that, and this is an old screenshot, that 390,000 people have viewed this. To reach 390,000 individuals as a lecturer was impossible a few months ago. And now, uploading it to a website, there's no charge, hundreds of thousands of people can access it. And what's interesting, I think, about these hundreds of thousands of people, they are all over the world. So this is actually from UCI's open courseware experience that learners from 159 countries access these materials. At the same time, 25% of the people coming to the site are from California. So you have this really interesting mix of people, very strong local interest, but also kind of diffusion, global diffusion, where all these people who had no way of getting these materials before, who now, who obviously have a demand for them. And in terms of the access, this is more, I guess, about money, where I, but maybe equally applicable to other parts of the world. This wasn't 2010, this isn't kind of forecast for 2012. And I should have taken one before, where basically there was almost nothing for everything meaning up to 2010. So the amount of access, this is the internet access coming into the countries in Africa. So the amount of access is increasing so rapidly right now that very soon broadband internet access will be affordable in large part, at least all the coastal nations of Africa. So the result of this is that we now have the world's greatest educational resources and content available, free of charge online so that everyone can reach them. And millions of other people that we put could potentially learn with using those materials. So the current model is broken is how we started. What's nice now is that everyone can actually help to fix the situation. So it's not just the information doesn't actually come from the institutions, but it can come from other places. And I think that is the fundamentally the story of the university where we saw there was all this content on the internet. But there was a disconnect between the content and making use of it and turning it into learning and turning it into experiences that would help people advance in their lives, in their careers, or maybe help them get into academic opportunities that weren't available to them before. So here the university has been around for little more than a year. It's really centered on the two pillars of open content and the open social web. So bringing people together, giving them access to content and creating learning opportunities. It's completely free of charge. Anyone can get involved. The courses are all run by volunteers. A course in our model is usually a six week long kind of set of challenges that people work through. But there's huge, I mean if people want to do eight weeks of four weeks, it's completely open to that. So there's flexibility. The learning model is fundamentally different for at least in principle, because that could be an interesting aside actually to come back to. So the structure is really peer learning where the role of the lecturer or professor is minimal, really more as a facilitator who helps people learn, but not someone who is the content expert. And I think right now there is still more a vision than a reality for a number of reasons. One is that people are just not used to this. So they kind of don't trust it. And only people who have experienced it, and often they've experienced it in great institutions like UCI, kind of have made that mental switch where they go, yeah, well actually, I've got these things with my fellow students, not necessarily from the professor. And so then they have the confidence to kind of take that step. But yes, I mean the principle is very much focused on peer learning, putting study groups together rather than having someone teach those groups. We've got, this is kind of a, I guess to highlight the fact that there is demand. We've done zero marketing, so it's all word of mouth and kind of people thinking it up online and using Twitter and Facebook to get the word out. We have about 10,000 registered users on the site. We ran 54, I think it is, courses in Ustaq, which started in January. More than 3,000 people signed up for them, 2,200 were accepted into them, and 1,400 enrolled. And I'm using kind of activity in week two as the enrollment to determine some of that. And we've grown, every round we've doubled so far, and so we're planning to do that at least for one more year. Which means double the number of people in the number of courses every three months right now. And we also, we've had courses in three languages. English is by far the most popular language. But there is a strong Spanish community in America. There was a very strong Brazilian community that worked down with it. But so yeah, courses in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is kind of a special project within peer-to-peer university. It's a partnership with Mozilla, where we try to use the peer-to-peer model to apply to web developer training specifically. So peer-to-peer university as an overall is, you can run any course that you want to run there. I'll give two of the examples later. School of webcraft is much more focused on one particular area. It has the strong partner in Mozilla who give content expertise, who bring a community of web developers and who will also be certifying some of the achievements that people make in these courses. And so maybe to kind of lead into what are some of the use cases, why are people running these courses? Why are, what's the interest in peer-to-peer university? And as much as we know this, right, we haven't been very good at connecting data on people who come to us and what they're doing. But the web development field is very strong response that people basically said, well, there isn't really a great place to become a web developer. Like I can go on the internet and I can try to find my way and find these communities and I can submit problems and maybe someone will help me. But there isn't really a community for people learning web development. And the alternatives that you had where you could go to university and study computer science where web development is a really small piece of all these other things you'd be learning. If you just want to be a web developer, you're going to learn a lot of things that you're not interested in. Or you could go into the private training fields where often the programs are very proprietary, not in line with the open technologies that actually drive the web, which are the most innovative things like HTML5, which is the next version of HTML, which is completely open. So those things, there wasn't really a space for these people and we definitely had that kind of, the PPP that confirmed that there was a gap and why people are coming to school or practice. Two other examples of why people would run a course with PPP and what they get out of it. Andrew Renz is a lawyer for South Africa. He spent a lot of time advising people about education on licensing issues. So people had questions about, I think it's fair use here, it's fair dealings in South Africa. How many pages can I copy? If it's under creative comments license, what does it mean, how do I license it? And so he was bogged down with questions and he was one of the very few people in South Africa who had this knowledge. So he designed a course, Copyright for Educators, because he hoped that he would have to do less of the work if he could make people learn it themselves. Didn't quite turn out that way in the first iteration, but his course was actually great because it was designed very aggressively to not have an instructor. And even the last assignment is to design an assignment for the next round of courses coming in so that he wouldn't even have to come up with new assignments. So for him it was kind of part of what he was doing anyway. He had the expertise to design the basic structure. He did want to teach the course. And this course has now had various iterations. It's grown into country-specific courses. So we've had a course for South Africa, UK, US, we're going to have Canada next, Australia. We now have courses specifically on creative comments and not just copyright, but open licensing. So he kind of started this whole road and people got involved. They started learning more courses. And so that's, I think, one approach to learning the course. This is Jane. She studied creative writing in Berkeley, actually, and then took a job. It kind of took her away from her writing career. She always had in her mind that she wanted to go back and write again. And so she went, of course, on creative nonfiction writing, which is a very unusual subject apparently. And it was a way for her to kind of reconnect with her passion that gave her some structure. And we were going to work through some examples and also work with other people and see, kind of, look at their work and kind of helped her come back to something she was interested in, but wasn't quite sure if it was going to be a career for her at any point, but gave her a little bit of structure to come back. So I think we have lots of people at Duke University who are following this category who just have some expertise, but really just want a reason to go back to something that they've started working on. So I think that's all kind of, I want to say, as a general introduction to how the university works and what it does and why people have been involved. And then we can obviously come back to any specifics. I want to just briefly talk about four issues that we've kind of been, I guess, thinking a lot about through this experience, just learning in the process. I mean, the one thing I didn't say, which I think is obvious, but that this has been just a huge experience. When we started this, it was just a bunch of people who thought, well, let's see what happens. And then the response has been overwhelming, actually, at every stage. And it took on a life of its own in some way to kind of, now it has this momentum, it's been incorporated in California as a 511c3, there's some ground funding to keep it going, we're working with all these partners. And so I don't think a year from now, a year ago or maybe a year and a half ago, the people who started it really were really sure that that was going to happen. So there's been a lot of experimentation, left and right and we kind of, when the choice is between structure and experimentation, we've always done the experimentation. And that's sometimes difficult for the user, but I think it's interesting for everyone else because we also share everything that goes wrong. So there are four kind of areas where we've done a lot of, we've done a lot of thinking and kind of just trying to figure things out. Then I want to just briefly mention, one is learning, obviously. So there is this idea that a lot of the learning that is most useful or very useful today happens outside of institutions where the institutions aren't really funding the people to the places where they are learning. The web development is maybe an extreme example, but I think the same is true in many other places where people form interest communities. They go back to things that were interesting in many years after they formally studied them. They need to upskill to stay in their work. And a lot of those things don't fit into the structures that we have created as institutions. Or they're simply too expensive and people don't have access to them. So there is a kind of a progressive attempt here to create new ways of life on peer learning. And what's been interesting for me to see is how much this has been driven by curiosity and kind of trying to solve problems. And I think that's inspiring for institutions because the flip side of this way, you're trying to teach someone something they're clearly not interested to such a frustrating experience. And it's so hard to sometimes create that sense of curiosity, but it's amazing to see how much of that actually is out there and how strongly the demand is from people to participate in these communities. I think there's a lot of energy that can be hardest by the institutions that kind of happens outside of institutions today. Secondly, we have a lot of questions around governance because peer-to-peer university is almost entirely run by volunteers. There's some people who get paid, but the decision making is extremely open and transparent. So even though I have the title of director, I have to be very careful what decisions I take and who I consult and how I communicate them. Because at the end of the day, if I do too many things that the community doesn't like, there's no more project. I can't pay people to do peer-to-peer university. So it's kind of this given day, right? The community does look for some level of leadership and people to do some things that the community doesn't want to do necessarily. But we have to be careful in how we involve the community in those discussions. And so I guess one kind of challenge is how do you grow this, which is really an early stage community to something like this, which is the Mozilla Summit, which is an annual gathering of the core resilience. And how do you still make decisions with people like this? You can see that they're quite, they're not falling completely into the culture which is a high-ranking expansion model. How do you harness these open communities in a way that you can still stay on track as a project? You don't get completely distracted, but you build these new governance models. The next question is, and this always comes up, well, how do you ensure quality? And usually the people mean quality of courses, like how do you make sure that the courses that you have aren't horrible? And I think there are two approaches to quality on the web that we've seen. One is the Yahoo, Yahoo, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but the left one, which is there's this mess and we're going to categorize it so that for the user it becomes manageable. And then there's, well, obviously the other approach is this mess, break with it, self-organize. We'll give the user some tools, they can make sense of it, but we don't try to categorize it. We don't try to hire people to categorize it. And so I think initially there has to be a transition from left to right here because obviously as long as we have very few courses that we've only run them a few times, we don't have a lot of data that we can offer to the user. We can't tell them this course is run three times, everyone's dropped out every time, people really hated the experience. But as we have more courses and as we have a larger community, I think we will be able to shift that quality review from the entry point to the user. So I think at some point, people will receive thousands of courses of which a good number are going to be absolutely crap, but we will be able to give the users the information about these courses that they need to not do that. So rather than me going through and saying, well, we're not going to do this course because it's crap, I'm going to tell the user rather this course is never run before. So have a look at the materials and see who's running it to make up your mind. Or I can say, this is run before everyone's dropped out, people say bad things about it. If you want to take it, right? But probably it's not going to be a great experience. So I think our approach to quality is going to have to move to that level. But obviously that's completely different than the way that institutions do quality today. If you want to make sure that every course in your university is great, it doesn't always work. I mean, let's be honest. So in the last part, I think the certification, which is kind of the really good nut that holds it all together, I think at the moment. So we don't, PPP University offers no certification at this point and we will never be an accredited at university for these reasons. But at the same time, we want to make sure that the people who participate can have recognition for their achievements that is appropriate to what they want to do. So if I'm a web developer and I want to get a job, we want to create some form of recognition for you that helps you get a job. If you want to take a refresher course before you enter a master's degree, we're going to try to help you transfer that what you've done in PPP University into the institution that you're applying to so that they maybe give you credit and free credit for that one course. And if you just want to do it because you want to do it and you want to put on your blog that you've done this course, then we're going to help you do that. So there are two areas that that falls into that we're experimenting with. One is actually with UCI, where we've been talking for a while, it's still very conceptual, but the idea would be that for continuing professional education credits, we would link massive online courses where people self-organize at peer learn with assessments and certification that is handled at UCI. So the quality control kind of comes at the end. The institution makes sure that people have the skills that they need. But the learning to some of these outsourced to be open web and you let people handle that and how everybody that makes the most sense to them. And then the second area, which is I think more, I guess a little more experimental and kind of quality to get your head around is, well, how do we create complimentary certification that makes sense on the web? And David mentioned that just, that's kind of what the term we started using in general. And the idea is really why shouldn't you be able to wear all of your achievements on some kind of, not a vest or anything, but online obviously, but have some form of collecting them, organizing them, determining who you're gonna show them to. But it's in your space and those are all your achievements and those achievements could be anything we've done that you care about. Could be a top piano to my knees and she's now a great pianist. Or it could be I studied law at Yale whatever is the achievement that is valuable to you. If there's a way to recognize it, why shouldn't we give you the tools to kind of aggregate them and communicate them to other people. And online, that would obviously look a little bit different. This is just a mock-up that we're working on with visitor where we are actually building. So we're a little further along here than I might have made it sound. We're building an open infrastructure for badges where any organization could become a badge viewer and publish badges into this infrastructure. And users would be in control, their badges are tied to them through their ID that they use online and they could control who gets to see those badges. They could move them to their blog. In the next stage, they could display them linked in or in Facebook. But the infrastructure that moves those badges around is completely open and anyone can participate. And the validity of the badge really rests with the issuer. So the infrastructure doesn't put any requirements on the issuer in terms of how many issuer badges. And so the university would be one issuer for these badges. I think I'm at the end of the video. So I think, I don't know, that was kind of a huge amount of stuff that I tried to cover fairly quickly so we have time to discuss. But if any of it was not clear, it would be great if we, I'm happy to go back to any of these pieces and scroll down into more detail. And yeah, I look forward to the conversation. Thank you. It's very interesting to discuss this. There's some, I'll put it on after lunch. Sometimes in college, if this is very much in the lunch. First I want to say something about Phillip. I'm just a very individual. He lives in a breakfast center of the world. It's called South Africa. And he, he's almost everywhere all the time. I don't know how he does it. That's one thing. I think he mentioned UCI's involvement. I think the main thing I helped him with was to tell him about Ambien. I think he was just, that probably. You actually gave me one. I gave, I got a pair of badges and said I could give you one. But he's incredible. You know, he interacts with people with coat and tie and gray hair falling out. But he also operates with people just as easily who have torn t-shirts and orange hair put into a mohawk. So he's extraordinary. The way he's put this whole thing together is extraordinary. And the people, the four or five or six people that really started with him are also extraordinary people. And he's given actually voice to what I just learned this last summer. Something I hadn't heard about before, the edupunk. Anybody heard the word edupunk? Yes, a couple people. These are folks who not only do not want to go to a formal educational experience as offered by university, but actually aggressively seek ways to go around it and do their own education. And peer-to-peer university is that sort of link between the structure and the non-structured world that really has to be made. And so peer-to-peer university is doing a great job of that in a very experimental space. One of the things that peer-to-peer university is doing is something that happened that we found out in 2001 when we did our first Hewlett Grant on learning repositories. In that, even in that early stage, we found out that the whole world of open courseware and open repositories was supply-side-oriented. So in fact, users were not being consulted at all. People were putting up open courses and just doing whatever they wanted. And guess what? Nobody was using it because really the users hadn't been consulted. What's happened over these years is that we began to incorporate first slowly and now more aggressively the notion of users into the whole idea of the open world, the open educational world. The peer-to-peer university represents really an extension of that whole idea that we want users to actually decide what they're going to learn and then go about learning it in a kind of a learning co-op. We have a sort of a learning co-op that I see taking years. We have a sort of a learning co-op here at UCI called the Osher Lifeline Learning Institute. That is a group of people who get together to decide what they wanna learn and then acquire, get the learning resource they need and then get a lecture. Well, this is the same sort of thing, the same notion peer-to-peer university is got a version of that same notion and it's really a learning co-op. From my perspective, from continuing education, again, we see this from a slightly different aspect than most people in the university do because we've been serving people who are busy working adults who want their education in convenient forms. They don't want to have to drive on the freeway for 45 minutes each way if they can help it. They want it at whatever time they can get it and so after the kids are in bed. So we've been trying to fulfill the notion of convenience in education. And also, our people are very sophisticated users of continuing education. They already have degrees. And so, generally, they know what they want. They want it in the most convenient and quickest way. They have an opportunity cost for all their time. And so this notion of openness has also served our audience and our perspective. We have in higher education, for instance, often, frequently, well, I'm sorry, we have already established a process by which learning can be validated by challenge tests or even we can give credit for life experiences in some institutions. And this is the kind of notion of extending the learning, redefining the learning space, not only to university level subjects and formal education, but well beyond those kinds of experience that we offer so prominently here at UCI. So we have it, peer-to-peer university is really in that same kind of tradition, although it also extends that tradition quite dramatically. Just one quick notion, the UCI OpenCourseWare site, we have Adriana Amistis and Larry Cooperman who are really the people who are putting this, who have been putting this together. We now, I would say we are second only to MIT in terms of the institutional expression of OpenCourseWare. We are a distance second. They have 2,000 courses. We have maybe 52 or 55 courses. But we're getting there and when you look at what other people are doing, we're, as I say, I think we're a distance second. We now have about 30,000 visits a month to our courseware site. We have 52 courses up. We have over 70 videos up and we're extending the idea of OpenCourseWare in many directions, one of which Philip mentioned, which is the notion of granting or learning assessment in certain areas such as continuing professional education. This is where we're really excited about our partnership with peer-to-peer university. This is an experiment in a formal, well-established research one university trying to make connections with the learners of the world who need the kind of services that we can provide from this university, which is validation of learning experiences, putting learning experiences into the proper context. That is the formal context as we recognize it. And for those who want it, giving them the certification that they need to fulfill their motives. And that's basically what continuing education really is all about, that's why we're doing it. But it's also wonderful to be in this same innovative space with these kind of cutting-edge, very experimental efforts such as peer-to-peer university. We will be doing, as Philip said, we'll be doing some things with peer-to-peer university material but we're also doing those same kind of things with material that's been reduced by our own faculty. Through video tapes, through video lectures and so forth, we're beginning to get the notion of putting learning assessments inside video presentations and then providing a certificate of completion or certificate of learning to those folks who have taken that learning, seen that video tape, taken that learning test and satisfied the learning requirements and the things. So we're doing this and a few other things to try to serve in this experimental space that Philip has described. So again, I wanna close by really validating and really congratulating Philip on what he has done. Frankly, two years ago when I heard about peer-to-peer, I thought this is a non-start, this is not gonna go anywhere. And I certainly thought about that as I began to see what was happening. It's really been pulled together wonderfully and more support has been coming through and more money has been coming through. And so we're now very excited about seeing what happens next and I'm pretty much convinced that this is gonna live and continue to grow and prosper. We're very happy to be associated with it. Bill Bowen. Thanks for inviting me to comment on this and I think Philip, that introduction from you. I spent some time over the weekend taking a look at the website and some of the courses and some of the material and it was very helpful to get your framing just now. I'm kind of a curmudgeon so I just want to say that right up front. And I'm also the sort of professor that generally doesn't allow my lectures to be videoed and posted for a bunch of reasons. And one of the reasons I think is because for me, the classroom, even the large lecture hall is really a dramaturgical space where I'm trying to get the students to do various things and think in certain ways not just on a one-off kind of here's today's lecture, I will now review content and then it starts again. But over the course of an extended conversation during a quarter, it's very difficult for that kind of thing to be excerpted on YouTube. So that's another sort of disclosure. And a few other disclosures as well. I've sort of been thinking in the past couple of weeks about a couple of things that have been happening in the world. The post deal where free crowdsource content all of a sudden came in $300 million, not shared out to any of those folks. The peculiar kind of investment decisions around Facebook that are taking place where we can have a kind of investigative and capitalism, but the investment opportunities for Facebook are closed to J.D. Morgan and 30 special people. So it's not the kind of open model of anybody can be a shareholder, anybody can be a shareholder of IBM or Intel, but not Facebook. And then finally, from my own particular kind of cranky, this whole show, in this weekend's redesign of the New York Times magazine, we're in the letter section, changed from being letters to being reply all. So just all of which is to say, I appreciate the kind of experimental quality of what's being proposed here, but I want to try to push a bit and be a little bit provocative in my comments today here. And I should say another kind of, in the interest of disclosure, both in the practical work that I do and the institute that I erect and in my research activity, I'm really, really, really committed to and interested in the idea of user-driven innovation and the kind of user-driven movement of various larger scale systems out there in the world, including education. But then I start to wonder at what point we can't equate scholarship with content and we can't equate, say, being a professor, being a hot leader. So I've got kind of three big things to say. The first is, can we spare virtue in things that are closed as opposed to open? What I'm thinking about is the way that there are very different notions of openness that are in this project and in a lot of projects like this that get kind of collapsed together. And I'm not entirely sure that that's always helpful. So we've got kind of the openness of open source and open code, openness in terms of access, openness in proprietary terms, indexed by things like creative comments and then openness in terms of decision-making and governance. We're using the same word for each one of those things. Each one of those things, I think, has very different work to do, maybe works well with certain kinds of educational missions, maybe doesn't work so well with others. And I'm thinking about, when I sort of say, is there virtue in things that are closed, I'm thinking about how difficult it is to have this kind of conversation about this kind of experiment in such a heavily socially mediated context where even though kind of openness in the sense of provisionality is touted as a value, it's not really allowed since if everything's open, everybody can tweet about this. I'm going to self-censor in ways that I wouldn't if I knew that this was a safe space of a closed classroom outside of which we don't necessarily share, unless you've done the work, unless you've done the homework, unless you've done the readings. I don't want you dipping into my class say, when I'm trying to get an evangelical student to take a pro-extent cell research position to test the limits of their thinking and their comfort zone. They're not going to be comfortable having that discussed outside. I'm not going to be comfortable asking to do that kind of activity if it is open in the sense of no walls. And this kind of makes me think about the history of the university and why there are walls, the history of things like the debate over academic freedom, which sets up walls to protect so that there can be crazy thinking going on here that doesn't offend the community with pitchforks, the donors, the government, the market, whatever. So, if everything is open, does this close down certain kinds of debating discussion? And another way of asking it is, would this model work with the humanities and social sciences, where by definition our subject matter is highly controversial and highly charged? And gets us into trouble enough with the walls, so without the walls we begin to see more trouble. The next thing I wanted to raise is, and this gets to the kind of Coffington Post sort of thing, is how do we think about how this works in terms of a rural structure by the market? And another way I could put this is what kind of capitalism does this work with or against? And I think it works both with and against. I don't want to be, I don't want to say it's all just new capitalism or something, but I want to think about that a bit. So we have this interesting kind of contradiction on the one hand of Christianity's pre and crowdsourcing and openness on the one hand, but then that's often paired with closed ownership structures on the other. Facebook is the example. From wearing a sort of hat at the government regulator, something like Facebook starts to look an awful lot like a public utility if it's being used for so many important functions or communicative and other functions for people. If it's starting to appear to be a common carrier or a public utility like the interstate road system or something like that, then how should we think about that kind of thing? Should perhaps ownership be open? And this gets to the whole question of ownership and things like how we create a commons license and how awkwardly they sit in the current moment with the kind of market structures that we live in. To say nothing of the university's place within those sorts of market structures. So that's my kind of, what kind of capitalism is a pure university adequate to. And then the last thing I want to raise here has to do with in a way the brand, the branding here by using the term university and what kind of value added is the notion of university still have. That's really intriguing to me and I think potentially quite interesting if this experiment can be used to push some of the boundaries of that brand so to speak in new directions toward various forms of user innovation without tearing down all the walls or eliminating all of the ownership. I'm interested too with this link to the notion of university and university to me it's very old fashioned kind of sense of university without being about that kind of universal knowledge, right? And the sort of the university is this sort of big thing where even sort of arcane knowledge can exist and even impractical knowledge can exist. There's an interesting thing here too for me with the notion of peer because we've also got at least two very different notions of peer going on in academia and in some of these digital media learning spaces. Peer in the sense of peer to peer as on the one hand kind of all of us anybody, right? This is a collaborative kind of sharing kind of world. But then the peer in peer review which is the hallmark of an academic decision isn't really like that, right? The peers in peer reviewed are they're a kind of community of equals but not really there is hierarchy. There's often anonymity or confidentiality so your work is reviewed by a group of your peers but you don't get an opinion they are and with a good peer review system they don't get to know who you are either and that's the kind of system that creates our equivalent of badges so to speak that authorizes the kind of knowledge that we produce. Again, even if that knowledge is impractical, arcane, of no current relevance we still have this process of peer review to say we may not, you know, the market, the government, whoever may not care one bit for maybe something like humanities that they want to get rid of, right? I mean just fill the blank, medieval French literature, sorry. Right? But, you know, here we hold together the peers in that field or you can speak to it in an intelligent way and, you know, they've given it their kind of warrant. It's interesting that in, and this is more of a sort of question, it's interesting that in P2PU that the U is there and I want to know what kind of badge and word that U does in this kind of experiment and, you know, if you need it if you not need it, what does it do? Could it really be a university in the sense of universal knowledge where, again, even the arcane is allowed in? So, you know, again, I say this in, as a sort of friendly complication but these are the sort of things that have been bugging me lately and this provides me an occasion to think about those things a bit more deeply through this really quite fascinating experiment. So I'm thinking we should talk some more about this. We're open for discussion. You can direct your comments or questions at any of the three speakers. Philip is obviously here. Must learn to field them all. Floor is open, yeah. I just wanted, I'm a research celebrity here. I took a peer-to-peer university class with Becca on cyberpunk literature. Your cyberpunk is wonderful. The first one? Yeah. Cool, great. Thank you. Oh, I thought it was perfect, no grades. Which is what a lot of us really are looking for in experience we can learn from without some autocratic judgment when we play Stunner after this. Philip, how did you come up with the name peer-to-peer? I understand it's peer-to-peer but are you using mostly the asynchronous model or is it both synchronous and asynchronous? It's both synchronous and asynchronous but we don't really, like we tell people what the tools are that they could use and then some of the courses are more asynchronous because people are very distributed. But the name is like, a lot of us come from the computer world so peer-to-peer file sharing is kind of, we thought of that structure of knowledge sharing maybe. And interesting comment about the branding. So, at the moment when we chose it I would say zero thinking went into choosing the name. It just someone threw it out and everyone else went, yeah, that sounds cool. And since then it's been really interesting to see the reactions because I think it's actually worked really well for us because it creates that tension in people's minds I think also in the project. Between this thing that's peer-to-peer, that's very kind of part of this new world whatever that looks like and then this old traditional term that has so much, holds so much, kind of people have such associations with it and kind of to have those two together actually works quite well because we are interested in those questions. We don't, I don't think we necessarily know the answers. Two kind of related things, both in a way and structural at two different levels. One I just had a question about the badges whether you've already considered a mechanism for cryptographic authentication of them so that a particular certifier can say that this person really did receive this thing and if not it should and it's fairly simple to do at the technical level so there should be a standard about how that's done. But the second thing was to respond to this point about what I take broadly to be this problem of walled gardens where community content is perhaps being co-opted and having a post case and most certainly Facebook is a prominent walled garden where contributed content becomes closed but I also think of a bill to the one there's very many of the examples of you know that movie database which you know is a widely used site and started out purely as user content but under these kind of sneaky guidelines where they could then ultimately close it all and you know prioritize it and I wonder from a like a charter point of view I mean from a legal point of view what you've done to make sure that there's no such threat in the future for your project. Yeah, I'd actually like to respond to that because I think there was some so I was very happy so obviously I liked the fact that Gary thinks we're great but I was really happy about your question because some are really questions that we're struggling with and it's good to kind of get more perspective on that and sorry this is just kind of a roundabout way to come back there but also because I think some of the attention that you're feeling about PewDiePie is more to do with our inability to articulate what exactly is that we're doing so for example the Facebook comparison and the capitalism that would work with PewDiePie University so it is absolutely impossible that any of PewDiePie University's content would ever be closed off because whatever is put on the side is licensed under CCBuyAsA so every user has the right to take everything and put it on their own website we have no control over what they do with it except that if they do follow-on works they also have to license them openly so we're not only giving everyone access to the materials we're actually almost forcing them to reopen whatever they do with them as well so it's very difficult so first of all legally it's impossible to take the content and close it secondly we had a discussion about should we incorporate it as a for-profit or not for-profit we incorporated it as a not-for-profit and I have to say it against my preference because it is so much work to do it but the reason why we end up doing it is because two things one is it's easier to cement a commitment to openness in the non-for-profit structure and secondly the perception issues around for-profit where it's just there's something like it could go the wrong way and the Zinna as a good example they have a for-profit that makes a huge amount of money but it is wholly owned by a not-for-profit that makes sure that they never do anything like they're having to close deal with Firefox so yeah we definitely so for me openness is I think goes beyond just having the content online and possibly building some business model into it and the cryptographic thing so Mozilla is really on the technology side Mozilla is leading the badge infrastructure development they've decided against it so far so basically a badge is just an X and R blog JSON actually and it says who's the identity of the person who has it who gave it and what's the URL that provides some form of evidence but then it's kind of up to you up to the application developers to figure out ways to build authentication into this in all of those trusted networks there isn't currently kind of a signing of the actual tokens that consent to them but the URL points to the certifier essentially the certifier is free to publish a list of exactly of the actual data that they have Pobi I've been trying to think about some of the conceptual implications of the model I was struck by your phrasing that within any decision we always opt for experimentation over structures and it made me think of Reinhardt's experimental systems which comes out of the sciences but which is a paradigm of a kind of future oriented learning where people are studying something of which the implications and the outcome are not quite known yet so it's a form of anti-secretary knowledge and in this concrete case I see it also as the new type of cyborg learning because I think we have to look at the agency of the web it's almost like the learning unit is the humans who use it plus the web and they kind of co-evolve together in a direction that might not be totally clear yet and my question in this sense is what about unintended consequences kind of blowback of the model you know the unintended effects and some of them I think you're already voiced are there concerns about how the model might be appropriated for less benign concerns or used for more capitalist profit oriented ways and all kinds of things but also for me it's also questions about what we all call the performatility of the classroom the face to face, the ethics of the face there's so many implications in that direction so I wonder if there's any thinking going into this Yeah, there is definitely so I think there are two things that I also wanted to make sure that people didn't get the perception that it would not intend so we have no intent to tear down all the walls of the existing universities or get rid of the universities many of us went to university it was a great experience for many different reasons I think one key one that is often unestimated or not at least mentioned or communicated enough is just the socialization aspect of spending and leaving your family spending four years in the cohort of people at the same age I think that is a hugely important aspect almost no one talks about these days it's all about innovation and all those things so we have no intention to get rid of the university and we have no intention to get rid of or have kind of low appreciation of the role of the great professor the person that can hold a conversation over an entire three months period that can get people set as learned minds on fire those individuals are fantastic and we appreciate them just as much as I think they are here I guess the point we are trying to make is that it's just a tiny slice of learning that happens and the kind of learning that people have access to I mean how many of these people that we learned under how many people can really spend four years to go to an institution like E-Zerovine you know just the capital investment so there's all this other learning that's out there that I think is valuable and maybe as valuable as what happened in the university so I think that's more the critical university story but to come back to your question about are we worried about certain things so I'm not worried at all about the capitalist concerns here because the project is set up in a way that the community will always have ownership of it so I mean maybe there is a way to undermine it if I'm not aware of but there's certainly no built-in backdoor for the people who are involved to kind of appropriate it in any way but I am not aware of any possibility for me to even do that so I'm not worried about the capitalist kind of influence on what's going on I'm worried about the capitalist influence of the job market that there will be more demand for courses that are job skills and people will get jobs and less demand for courses that are not so aligned with the job market but that your comment actually gave me a lot of hope because the cyberpunk course is the perfect example of a course that has very little relevance or at least in direct terms to the job market but it's a fantastic course and so the fact that we have those courses and hopefully we'll have many more of them I think is great and I would almost argue that it's easier to have a course like that at Pitt University than at UC Irvine where you have committees that approve so maybe there's more room for that kind of positive experimentation in terms of product care what really worries me is that people can't use Pitt University to promote certain extremist points of views and we don't have great mechanisms to defend against that right now so I can imagine a valuable course on any topic as long as it looks at all the different perspectives and it kind of tries to really understand what are the important questions and tries to get them and understand all the different classes but the reality is that there are many topics where unless the course is really well done it's a danger, it would be a harmful topic I would say and we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's the language we could use to say this course is in and this course is out and we haven't found it the best we've found at this point is if one course would discredit all the other courses so if one course, whatever the content of that course is would bring down all the others we reserve the right to not run it right now but the reason why we're struggling with this I think to some of you is that the community is still too small so to have this kind of filtering and community review you just need many more people in the same way that Wikipedia, you know their quality control is very good because they have thousands of people reading every change that comes through the pipeline and it's very easy to detect a bad change to revert it whereas for us we can have thousands of people who review all the courses I am really worried about people trying to undermine the whole project by running a course that denies the Holocaust for example there's a distinction to be made between the disposition of inquiry and the disposition of propagation yes and if one can find mechanisms for pushing a disposition of inquiry and for undermining or refusing a disposition of propagation as its principle but then I just want to point out one thing that Bill had mentioned that he was having trouble finding institutional sponsors particularly higher education institutional sponsors of the funding for the university and we were able to use Hewlett funding to support the P2PU with Hewlett as a write-in and Hewlett was specified I want to use it that way but there was several issues that we had to get cleared up and one of them was not only the really bad course or the course that taught something not very good but the notion of okay it's perfectly it's probably a logical maybe on current period to have a course on astrology or how to read the racing form or something like that which is not something the university wants to be associated with but we felt that because of the structure and how it was a separate organization so forth that we were insulated enough from that kind from that kind of criticism that we were okay but it goes back to what Professor Maras said about okay what is a university we've got a university in our time we're not here at the university in their title is there some sort of crossover sort of verification or credibility that we're lending by our association in some way but as they say we were able to work that out with our colleagues but when things are going we might need the racing form sooner than we have it try not to do that I think I'm still funding I'm far from it I want to be I'd like to ask you a question about validation just it seems to me that you know one of the inspirations of this new kind of university is to teach and learn something that works even if it's not validated in contrast to getting a validation for things that don't even work like your example about learning computer science you get a deep deep breath and then you can't put it in the world so it seems that, I mean, the university the formal university has many functions but one of its main functions it seems is to validate to give a validation for certain kinds of knowledge which is very good the question I want to raise is whether you know this idea of a peer-to-peer view can it do without a notion of validation? I know you get back to it and it's something that's very important in your presentation that seems to me to be this is a question to be slightly contradictory because the whole point of a peer-to-peer university is to teach what works even though it's not validated it's like, for example, the relationship of museums or biannuals to the artwork that's being produced one of the functions of a museum though they're great artworks of museums one of its functions is that it validates whatever is put into it but what is new about your idea of a peer-to-peer university is to focus on that which is quality in a sense so it's not like giving up quality control you have to sort of keep it that but quality control is not the same as validation so what I'm asking is could you take a stance like saying, you know, we are not going to give any validation no badges but I mean, we do this but it's based on these very different principles of teaching and learning because otherwise, I think the confusion would set it I mean, the question is in what way is this university different from another university? and that's why I think the question is, why is it quality in that way? so I think that I would like to tie the notion of validation to community that I think it's always tied to community some community determines what are its accepted practices and behaviors and what are its values and then it has some mechanism of validating actions or works that conform or don't conform there won't be a badge it could be, you know, like if someone learns to be a carpenter they could get a badge but it's based on the behaviors that carpenters are supposed to display the skills that they're supposed to have but the carpenter community knows exactly what that means now the thing is I think where PPU is different from other institutions I think the question with the institution versus community comes in is that institutions tend to create structures where those things that are valid are much more fixed whereas in communities, they are more in flux and so we would... I don't have a problem with validation I just think that the process of determining what is valid needs to be open and I don't think the process is opening up right now in many institutional educational settings where the web development is an uncontroversial example because it simply needs to slowly... it's not adequate for the technology it's trying to validate in the humanities, I'm not so familiar but I'm sure there are some issues around determining what is valid and what is not where structural processes get in the way of the communities there must be some tension somewhere so I think as a project peer to peer university the only thing we could validate is behavior that conforms with peer learning and so we could validate that you are a good peer learner and you collaborate with others, you share knowledge you reflect on other people's contributions those are things we could validate we can't validate skills or competencies in certain topic areas because we are not that community so what we're trying to do is we work with other communities so with Mozilla the web developer community can validate our developer knowledge and behavior and we are just a conduit into that community and I think that's a mechanism that is interesting for us and it kind of deals with the tension that you described where you don't want to fall in the old trap of fixing everything and having these rigid rules at the same time there is also demand for some form of validation I think it can be part of learning as well to get feedback on are you progressing in a certain direction that community as determined is the valid direction does that make sense? it makes sense three quick things I'm Tom Bellstore from the Anthropology department thanks for that three quick things are things that would be important to respond to it's awesome that it's Creative Commons license and it's nonprofit and that protects you but right now in Wisconsin they're talking about a 50% offending of the university they're talking about huge defunding of the university system here in California and elsewhere and the right enforcers who are behind that in many ways I can see them loving to get access to your PowerPoint where you talk about the system is fundamentally broken and there's an iron triangle and there's these pictures of the sad students sitting alone in the lecture room rather than some lonely person in the basement with their computer and there's no way that you could reframe this that doesn't have to be so antagonistic to the university system particularly because you're using the term when the university system is under such attack even though I don't think it's your intention I think this is completely co-optable by the right as an idea that the university system is broken there's an iron triangle what do you do with iron even with that metaphor you melt it right you can't reshape it so you must melt the triangle and re-melt it into this pure to pure thing it's going to save us a lot of money at the same time and get rid of all these pesky unions and these faculty and do all that and I know that's not your intention but just having Creative Commons as a non-profit does not insulate you from that problem because it's in the way that you're framing it as antagonistic to the university form and universities are messed up I know that for sure but can there be ways that this could be seen as part of strengthening universities which I think is your intention and to build on that it's striking that in this whole conversation there's not one word not one word about research so that university is completely conflated with teaching and I think this is scholarship with content and so one thing I think it's interesting to think about is that the value of universities isn't just about teaching there's spaces of research where new ideas and concepts and things are created that then you can teach people about and it might not be the part of a kind of pure to pure thing to do that work but the conflation of the university with learning I think is problematic because there's also research and actually service and pure to pure stuff could be awesome for service including engagement but the research piece I think I would love to see more on and then the last point to build up with this I do research and study life on virtual worlds I think virtual stuff is awesome but I think there's a real confusion in the way that you frame stuff about the pure to pure thing as a mode of pedagogy versus something linked to the internet because a lot of what you're talking about you could as an experiment do totally a neat space it wouldn't have to be online at all and then you can have online stuff that's totally hierarchical and uses the standard whatever and you know this already but in terms of the framing versus a way to do a kind of rhetorical framing of a project that isn't so hostile towards the university system to disaggregate a bit which aspects of this are cyber specific versus which aspects of this link to broader conversations about sort of rethinking pedagogy more generally because it points in your presentation I got confused between those two so obviously you're absolutely right that you would have no intention of trying to shut down the universities but I am I'd be interested to think more about how we can reframe the message in a way that avoids that danger but I also do struggle I think to some degree with that because some things are fundamentally broken and one has to be able to say and I think the cost of content for example is completely broken like the amount of money that people pay for textbooks especially in the US makes absolutely no sense when we've already paid for that with taxes and over and over again the same with research output so to kind of tiptoe around that I think also defeats the purpose of really wanting to change it I'd love to find a better balance between the two as I said before I don't want to get rid of the university and I think the especially things that are not market related should get public funding in the universities but I guess the things we are seeing as opportunities would play into those arguments to some degree research I mean we're not I guess it comes back to this branding thing that you call it a university you create certain expectations we don't do research and research is a crucial and fundamental role of the university some universities do more of it than others we do none so I don't know, I guess for me the idea of the university maybe is a little more about a community of people more just interested in sharing knowledge and not so tied to a particular I guess I would like also to come back to some of the comments earlier there are different ways of reading the history of the university there is the kind of the safe space where we can think about everything ideal which I would argue in most cases it was much more the Humbach University is the perfect example it was designed to create a common culture that could then be exported back into the regions of Germany to hold the nation together so it was the exact opposite of trying to encourage wide thinking and yet we still refer to the Humbach University often as kind of the one of the founding ideas of the university same with the religious history of the universities in the UK where it's the exact opposite of free thinking so I think that the ideal of the university that we probably share isn't so closely connected to the reality either and so I guess I want to defend the university a little bit in the sense that we also don't really totally fit that ideal but maybe we don't fit in other ways and the technology so that's a little surprising to me I think there is something fundamentally different about technology you're absolutely right that peer learning has nothing to do with technology per se this is peer learning in some ways but there is something new about technology and that it has kind of broken down these barriers and also let us create these new forms of collective and collaborative that we couldn't do before and it's just much easier to do that and we're kind of seeing it at a scale that it wasn't possible before so I think for us it's important so I guess the point that we're taking very seriously from your comments is we do need to go back and look at the messaging and communication very carefully because we are playing into different potential I would argue misunderstandings but that would who cares if it's a misunderstanding someone takes the idea and runs with it and that that could potentially be dangerous so thank you very much for those comments I'm going to go to the room thank you so much for this talk I relate to a lot of these things that I'm hearing today because I'm actually going to teach my first online course this summer and I teach composition in front of mine who teaches ethics is also going to be teaching online and both of these are not content courses so it's not like math or geography or something like that necessarily and so the actual dramaturgical aspect the performative aspect of my classroom matters a lot the production of the dissemination of knowledge which is often considered a university we're getting rid of the production of just disseminating knowledge and last time my friend and I were talking about this we say well is just giving away information in and of itself a value is that a quantifiable value that we could think of as being great and worthwhile just to give it out there or is the interaction with the student more important to make sure that they get the knowledge in a particularly appropriate or usable way and I don't know I don't know where I fall on this and I think this is a really great conversation I don't have an answer to my question as much as the voice and anxiety that I feel is prevalent in this room certainly amongst anthropologists the humanities you know because we don't teach content courses and we need that interaction but at the same time I agree as a graduate student to be in the university system that there is something broken here and it's not getting picked in fact if you ask most of my colleagues we think it's getting worse you don't see this as a sustainable model for academia and we don't think it's going to last most of my friends are terrified about going to the job market because we just don't even know what sort of job market exists and so I'm really excited about your project because I'm terrified about what's going on with this this work here is our problem and if we don't figure out something else to do we won't have this or that we'll only have that we'll only have the dissemination of knowledge by a few people and I think that's problematic too I guess I'm just scared I guess I'm just really scared of this or that and I think that if the collapsing of the two together that is the only possible avenue we have to look forward to and it isn't one or the other it's going to be the really crafty way we bring these two models into one, right? yeah I actually agree with almost everything you said or maybe everything but so I think it's some things are terrible to learn online it just makes it's either possible it makes no sense to me and it would be great to do them face to face I think other things might be better to learn online where you just need a more diverse group of people that you can interact with in different ways so as you say it's not one or the other with respect to the distinction between content and learning for me the content is just infrastructure giving away content is meaningless but the thing is that the the cost of giving it away is so low that you know basically it's like oxygen is there any value in oxygen to say no but when you breathe it becomes very valuable to you it's the same with content for me so content is just that stuff that you need to be able to learn but then the learning is the interaction between people and that's I think that's why it's called peer-to-peer it's not the content university the ideal would be that you learn through discourse and debate and engaging and being exposed to other ideas I think that is the for me that has been the most valuable way to learn for myself I wish that more people have access to that kind of experience but yeah I think that's why can you talk about your relationship to other discourse initiatives is there tensions between you are you working collaboratively with them or what's happening not really any tension I mean there's so we leverage everything that the open-coaster movement does actually I sit on the board of the open-coaster consortium so that group of institutions has published the numbers I think somewhere around 12,000 courses so that's where I came from I've been very strongly promoting universities to basically give their content away because I didn't think the content was the value of the university so we leverage that those materials and there's no conflict at all I think actually the contrary I don't think we figured out a way a good enough way to support the open-coaster projects so I think they're totally open to more collaboration and we haven't really figured out how to do that well with other open education projects that are not content focused, that are not focused so there are lots of projects that are looking a little bit similar to university with like slightly different flavors and variations and I think some more offline for example which are really interesting the one that started the university in California was the new school where you basically you submit, you say I want to learn this they find other people but you do it face to face I think that's awesome and then there are a few other online ones that are a little bit similar so no, I mean on one hand I think the space is so big right now and also no one really knows what's the best way to do it that it's more collaborative and competitive what I have noticed amongst all the other projects like Udemy and Super Cool School and Edgy Fire they're all for profit and so it's really interesting for me to see I think for them they're definitely going after the same kind of money and they're competing for customers we are kind of pretending that we don't have to do that right now and we'll see what happens but I think I can kind of feel torn about this because I want the project to succeed and do well and grow and be around 10 years from now but when we started it we made it very clear that one of the successes would be that we spectacularly failed but someone else learns from our failure and does it much better we would define that as success and so I still feel that way but at the same time obviously I take grant money and I try to make promises I say we're going to grow it we're going to do all these things and then failure doesn't feel good in that context so you want it both ways we want it both ways yeah well just as an illustration to your comment the walls are tumbling down when I go sit in our lectures here or sit in the back the students have their laptops open some of them never glance up in the entire lecture to see what's being visually shown but and some of course are social networking but I think a lot of the other ones are actually looking they're no longer confined by the walls they're using the rabbit and outside the walls and they're looking at either what they're interested in or while you were lecturing here I looked up your course catalog then I looked up the MIT my course catalog just to see what these things were doing but the conventional lecturers here you know they have it's not ordinary no one knows how to comprehend what's going on and the students eventually are voting with their minds what sources they want to use and finding anything on the web is very disorganized you never get it at the right level you never get it organized integrated, prepared which is the way we evaluate our teaching here for those criteria so it's somehow a compromise between these two has to be found so the students can use web material but they also have to use standardized, prepared, integrated outlook that your instructor brings to the course two thoughts on this and one connects back to what you raised earlier it's kind of the connection between the open and the closed how do we make that work for both we actually had one course that was taught at a university in Japan Keio University Digital Journalism and it was open to Keio University learners and I've looked around at other people who've done similar things and the overwhelming response of those experiments has been that they improve the experience for everyone involved, the professor because there are more people that are active and bring diverse ideas the students in the institution because they get feedback they perform so I guess there is that same space question which I didn't have time to come back to it's really interesting they perform on a much bigger stage it's different, you write a blog post the whole world can read it or you write it in Blackboard and only you or seven people in the class can read it and then you get a response from someone it's an amazing experience for the students in the institution obviously for the Keio University because they get access to a university course for free and the interesting thing in that course was the best work was done not by Keio University students but by the PPU students because they were just I think my interpretation they were so motivated to show that they can also do it and the university students were they had to do all these other courses they needed to hit whatever help they needed the marks so I think there is some integration the learner level that makes sense for for both and at the structure and experience and curation level I'm really interested in the notion that the great teacher asks the right questions rather than helps with the right answers and so we're trying to find in the courses we're trying to encourage people to design questions and let the community figure out the answers themselves because I think it's the big questions that you only know once you have looked at something from all the different sides and you have time to go back and reflect you know what are the big questions you might never know the answers right but you discover the questions as you gain expertise at least that's kind of this notion that I'm playing with in my head right now I would love and I think the structure argument works at the question level in both worlds very comfortably or expands both worlds it doesn't really work if the curation comes at the answer level you help people more through that course which might be necessary in some instance or I'm sure it's necessary but I think that works better in the more structured environments along those same lines I was thinking about you mentioned assessment and so a more typical view of assessment you're thinking about a body of knowledge that you want the learners to have and you're assessing them informally or formally and do they have it and the instructors can facilitate as they find out what they know and what they don't know and where they need to get in what you've done so far can you elaborate a little bit about what kind of courses you've been working with and the questions you're asking yourself and challenges you're facing in creating some sort of assessment instruments that are part of the courses did I hear that right that there were some kind of assessment Larry maybe you could talk about the thing we're doing with this video well I can just I'm Larry Kupman from the director of UCI of course where I serve on the open course with Philip so whenever I say I have a conflict I'm just talking about but we look at both our open course we're initiative and then the peer-to-peer initiative sort of extensions of the public mission of the university as we sort of see it and I'm sorry I'm prefaceing my remarks but as the ability to create concentric rings around the university and access to the fantastic work that's done by faculty here at UCI and so we have one we have these little technical projects that we're doing to see how can we provide assessment sometimes you get continuing education credit by going to a meeting sitting there and signing a sheet at the end of it and so whether there's been learning is anyone's guess is a technology based solution to do better than that by essentially having somebody actually watch or the video lecture if you will but actually interact with it so given HTML5 and JavaScript and hopefully we'll get me a badge someday you can basically find out where somebody clicked on a video when they did it questions, interactions with a general question and do it in assessment then of whether somebody in their interactions with a specific set of content performed accepted and provides the same kind of continuing education credit that somebody might have otherwise gotten simply in a passive fashion city the one thing I would add is I think that's kind of the transition to the formal environment where I think you have much stricter guidelines and regulations on how you can do these things within Peter Peter University at this point we're more interested in assessment for learning than assessment of learning giving people feedback while they're learning lots of peer review basically helping people using assessment to help people learn rather than to put a stamp on it at the end we do hope to be able to put a stamp on it in terms of the the Zinnab edges but those are also driven partly by those kind of behavior little things like you're doing things with a different purpose like you're building something, you're building a website and as part of that once the website is built you've succeeded in a way that's also assessment but it's kind of there's some other purpose than the assessment you're not writing an exam about building websites at the end there's another interesting thing that we're just experimenting with this a little bit but several of our colleagues around the country have found that they can predict the success or failure of a particular student in a particular learning object simply by looking at the number of interactions or clicks on the material, how long they stayed there and how often they were on actually non-academic measures but very highly predictive of actually completing that course successfully or actually completing the entire degree program successfully so their assessment is becoming a little bit sometimes a divorce from what we think of as academic success but if you're really interested in predicting success in a particular learning project you use all kinds of data and this is with new technologies now where we can actually track this stuff in a very very minute way and data might look at across thousands of sometimes thousands of instances we can get a pretty good predictive model of success and be able to then to prescribe interventions earlier in the process than later in the process I just had one question you have a nonprofit and you have donors right? you've been seeking sponsorships investment from the private sector is that right? not from the private sector, just from foundations so far yes so back to your question about the marketplace and about what we're doing to deliver people to the demands of the marketplace is there room for a private sector investor to sponsor some aspect of this either it's infrastructure, it's content so that what's driven is delivering to that corporation a specific kind of educated citizen who can be engaged to the broader, in other words what is the incentive for someone to sponsor beyond the P&P? so I think there are possibilities to monetize pieces of what P&P does in a way that wouldn't conflict with its value of openness and freedom so I think one aspect could be which I'm not so interested in but the market of learning management systems that universities use is pretty dire the quality of the software that is out there and that is very very expensive so we're building a platform for online peer learning that we provide consulting services around for universities we could sell it but it's open source so you could also just take it and run it but we could modify it or we could give you a widely available version to it that you could run with your students we could protect privacy but that becomes a research activity and service activity that would be product service the only reason why we would do that is to generate income to support traditional universities like they've operated on they're accredited based on say the number of chairs but Larry Maurer has a distinguished chair he's the holder of a chair and then great graduate students want to kind of study under him because he is a stellar faculty member producing new knowledge to which great graduate students want to gravitate and they have an outcome of research and knowledge right but this model doesn't really allow for that as I'm seeing like a stellar teacher but no military for example like Sherry Rowland on this campus is always cited as the exemplar somebody who's and I'm just trying to say we've always measured ourselves on the quality of our faculty as measured by the number of chairs that private sector invested the Wells Fargo chair in and they typically want something out of it like they want to deliver business graduates or graduate students who are studying dark particle science and push the envelope of the origins of the universe with what I'm gay had where is there room in this model for the sustainability of those kinds of excursions the model you described for example there's no room for that model in the European universities either so it's a very U.S. centric model right but not so I think the question that's not how PTO works it's not a fair question I was just trying to get back to this whole issue of pedagogy and what it is the value that we're actually seeking for people who because you mentioned the cyberpunk course which really was more of an enrichment right I hope so personally enriching but it didn't necessarily qualify for a course credit didn't necessarily satisfy his employer's requirement that he get continuing education it was self enrichment two answers so one is there are lots of things that do not qualify for credit that actually are good for employers so if they are like the web developer for example right if you want a good web developer there's no what's the university degree you filter them through where does the private sector go the private sector there's no mechanism right now for them but if you take a course at the school of web club not right now but let's say by the end of the year you know your trust in the abilities of those people will be higher than for an employer then your trust in the ability of someone who just has a university degree in computer science as a web developer specifically so I think that's the one thing I think I lost my train of thought there so the other thing is maybe that model of funding doesn't make sense for university but maybe there are other ways of funding for you I mean so I could see a model where we aggregate if you've done something in computer university you've taken it say 7 or 8 courses we help you aggregate everything you've done there in some way that's easy to consume for an employer and then you decide to show it to the employer the employer has to pay for it because it gives them trust in your abilities and you know I mean hiring people is super expensive because there's such high rates of failure and so if we can increase employer's confidence that they're hiring the right people they're willing to pay a lot of money for that obviously that would have to be controlled by you as the learner not by us we wouldn't ever sell someone's data but if the learner says I want to get a job here you know I want you to summarize all this stuff to the employer and the employer has to pay for it so maybe that's a business model that could support the nonprofit because I certainly don't think running after grants is a fun or is a great long-term sustainable strategy I was just looking for the case for why a private sector investor would want to sponsor these open work courses that's what I'm looking for I've seen said why and why should I invest the funding doesn't happen at the same level I'm just saying I'm actually working with a project right now towards that era and so I'm looking for a reason why when I meet the case for good presentation if you took bazilla out of the equation here and that for-profit it's sort of the same thing they have bazilla has not only a worldwide idea but there's a there's a model actually not just an employment model they actually thanks Gary it's the perfect example, bazilla has a mission, a social mission to support the open web so they want to have more people around that understand open web technologies and are open web developers and they're putting money into providing those training opportunities so yeah it's exactly the same I could make the same argument for green fees they want more people who care about the environment I can start a garden or something and so green fees will put money into training courses and universities have a very cost-efficient way of basically spreading that knowledge into a community that then self-perpetuates the learning opportunities so I guess that would be good I think we want to continue this one through thank you thank you very much