End of wk one in P2PU Mktg course

With week 1 of the Entrepreneurial Marketing course coming to a close, I thought I’d summarize some observations.

– Participation has been strong. A week before the course even started (just after notifying folks who were enrolled), people started posting and even setting up new forums for week 1 assignments and other topics.

– At the end of week 1, there have been 227 forum posts. Wow. Pretty much too many for me to keep up with.

– By my rough count, over 80% of the participants have posted something in week 1. That’s considerably higher than any other online learning experience I’ve been involved in the past. (Only one person dropped out before the start, which I invited if folks didn’t think they could commit to the whole course.)

– Communications, for me at least, have been a bit haphazard. The internal messaging system in P2PU is difficult for me to use/track (no archives, etc.), and I don’t have participant email addresses. (I asked for them but didn’t get enough to use them instead of the system messaging.) This has been difficult.

– I also suspect that with the large number of system notifications going out, folks are missing the broadcast messages. To try to address this, I’ve set up a “Course admin messages” thread in the forum. We’ll see if that helps.

– The synchronous chats didn’t work very well because of scheduling. There were no times when everyone or even a majority of folks could make it, so I picked two times that a good number of people said worked for them. The first session had only 2 participants (though it was a lively and valuable conversation). The second session I messed up the time on, but don’t think anyone else was there either. (If so, I humbly apologize for the mixup.) Apparently, many missed the message about the chat times. (See above.)

We’re trying the chat thing again for next week. (This time I did a sign-up in advance to see if we can get a critical mass.) We also had a suggestion to try an audio and/or video Skype session, which we may do.

I made the chat sessions optional so it’s also possible that there just isn’t a lot of interest in them. I’m not sure.

– I am feeling like the number of folks in the course is, as I suspected, too many. But maybe that’s just a reflection of my need to be “on top of” everything, which may not be important in a class like this. I guess we’ll have to wait to the end and see how everyone else feels. :)

Anyway, I’ve learned a lot already and hope others have too. Stay tuned for more reflections.