Peeragogy In Action #12: Opening Education

Opening Education - Edited Transcript (edited for clarity and accuracy - to be updated) Hello and welcome to the 12th episode of the Peeragogy In Action podcast called Opening Education! So we're going to be talking about open source education with Peter Shukie in the UK and David Preston (if he solves his technical issues), in California. 0:28 CHARLOTTE If you're wondering what the Peeragogy Project is about, this year marks our 10th anniversary of collaborating to build what we call the “no longer missing guide” to all things relevant to successful peer learning and peer production. We like to remind people that we didn't invent Peeragogy; it's been happening since the beginning of time and maybe before! 0:52 Through this podcast called Peeragogy In Action, we aim to provide an interactive space where participants and audience can explore the philosophies the concepts contributors and practical Peeragogy and we aim to keep these discussions for informal and free-flowing discussion within some minimal guidelines 1:16 In these livestream/podcasts, we generally work around two to three talking points or topics. We go live via video to the Peeragogy channels on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We invite you to consider 1:33 subscribing [to PIA] on your podcast app; I think we're on all of them and you can find all the replay & audio links at PiercePress.com/peeragogy-in-action. That’s also the easiest place to find them and several doves and archived recordings reside on our youtube channel we've been doing it like I said since 2012. and please consider subscribing and participating in future livestreams. That makes for a more rich discussion and more interesting for us. With that said I'd like to go back to introducing our guests and I'll turn it over to Joe Corneli to do that. 2:25 JOE: Hello, so in fact Charlotte is going to join us later as a as a guest representing the Peeragogy Project and we hope to be joined by David Preston, who was a contributor to the the Peeragogy Handbook. 2:42 Peter Shukie is our first guest; we reached out to him after coming to know of his work with Community Open Online Courses (COOCs). So Peter if you'd like to just introduce yourself to the audience and a bit to us as well we can get to know you. 3:02 PETER: Sure, I'm Peter Shukie, i'm a lecturer in higher education in a college-based university center in East Lancashire, which is in the northwest of England, between Liverpool and Manchester. 3:24 I think thatthe first time I got involved with Peeragogy was probably about 10 years or maybe at the beginning of time! I was interviewed then about COOCs when it was in the design phase; later it became a phd thesis and project but COOCs, or Community Open Online Courses project was a direct response to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). 4:04 I don't know if these terms still get used as much as they once did, but in the Connectivist MOOC, the idea that this would be like an egalitarian space where we were going to learn and create new ecologies of learning; then the X-MOOC which seems to really dominate now and they're the blue chip institutional base moves. Both of them were indeed massive and both focused so much on the massive that I thought there's such a missing space here, and that is Community. 4:32 So how do people that need to use technology that are actually cut off from those other spaces that have through resource through economics through culture through location, in terms of geographic location or societal location? They really do need to be part of this and there are small micro-communities under threat of being isolated again right when actually we can do things to make that happen and to be part of something new. 5:04 So the idea of COOCs was to create smaller spaces but not in a sense of massive community but where everybody can teach and everybody can learn for free. Is that is that enough to start, Joe? 5:23 JOE: That's certainly enough to get us started Peter, thank you so much. I love the community over massive idea and when David Preston joins us he can explain his work and thinking on open source learning. So More on the process of sharing the methods and ideas that you've been developing…. 5:52 But while we’re waiting for David, a follow-up question for you Peter, as the owner and proprietor of this COOCS.org website and if someone else wanted to run a COOC say we wanted to run one how would we do it? Would we visit the website and click this and click that, and host it ourselves on COOCs, do you have another process where someone can go off and run it on their own, in their own time, on their own platform, or how does that work? 6:22 PETER: Yes, good questions. We wanted to have a platform that people could go on wherever they were and create courses and that happened within the first three years. We thought it would be be quite small and it'd be in the northwest of England. We had 1500 users within the first three years which Isn’t a massive in technology terms, and in network terms, but people were actually creating courses in pretty diverse locations on every continent. Now what happened was over a period of time we noticed a lot of people created courses and then left them and they were abandoned and there was a real ethical dilemma. Do we just shut them down or do we maintain them? Because people are taking the time to produce them but they haven't been back and sometimes they haven't been back for years. In the last 12 months we've shifted the process, so you can still go on and create courses, but now our focus is not to make COOCs all things to all people, but to to work with organizations and help them create the COOCs; the ones that work really well have had existing organizations not organizations necessarily but a community so a community come together and use the COOCs. So the idea that we kind of began with and that was part of the investigation is will people create courses just as an individual in the hope that other people will come and join and that happened but only in tiny ways. I think there was a whole phenomenon behind course creation that we were not aware of. So somebody may be an expert we had an artist set up this really beautiful one; I won't give the name of the creator but a really beautiful one about making the invisible visible, He put it out there for other people to come. It became clear that the expertise and the message was there but what was missing was how to create a community online? How do you go and find those other people; they don't just happen by. It's not like High Street where the people will go past a building and come in. It's a web address there's absolutely no way you would encounter it unless somebody comes and brings you in, so there was that issue. 8:51 Since people don’t necessarily stumble across these COOCs, we now work with existing communities first to make a course. But if somebody was listening to this now and wanted to make a COOC, could they? The answer is yes. Currently, we're switching from one domain to another; we’ll have the same web address but changing hosts. The basis is still WordPress with Moodle. TO BE UPDATED - visit https://piercepress.com/peeragogy-in-action for the replay