It’s the end of week 3 in our P2PU Entrepreneurial Marketing course.
Some things have gone better than expected; others less so.
First (and foremost to me :), I’ve learned a ton. Not only about open ed and peer learning, but also about marketing. It’s been a great experience.
At the onset of the course, I was a little concerned that the group was taking a more technical (less marketing) focus than I would hve chosen. Of course, it’s a peer class so it’s really their choice, but the course seemed at risk of turning into a web dev class (of which there are many great ones on P2PU). This is something I’ve seen in other open ed environments — they tend to attract a “techie” crowd and so learning often leans that way. No problem with that except for folks who aren’t so inclined whom I’ve sometimes seen scared away as a result. At any rate, after an initial burst of that in the first week, it’s leveled off, and now we’re mostly talking about marketing stuff.
Participation has still been strong, but there was a noticeable drop-off between weeks 2 and 3. My theories about this are:
- Most online courses drop off at this point. This course has done so less than others I’ve been involved with. Not sure of a way to prevent or slow this.
- This course had an assignment for week 2 that was big and challenging and may have been a barrier. In the future, I have ideas about how to scale this assignment to be more manageable.
- Communications have been a huge challenge. Several folks in the course have told me that they have turned off all notifications. And, I suppose, out of sight is out of mind. In the future, I would make an email address a requirement of the application and use that for broadcast (facilitator) messages instead of the built-in messaging, which frankly is not usable. (Yes, I know this is being reworked. Thank you.)
The one thing that I have been really disappointed in is any attempt at synchronous chats. Many have told me that this is important and is what makes other P2PU experiences work. It has not worked for most of our class. I have scheduled six chats now and have never had more than a few people (typically 2-3) on them (out of 40 in the class). I’ve tried different times, letting participants’ suggest times, tweeting, etc. with no better results. I think is in part a result of the general communication issues described above, as well as the general busyness of everyone’s lives….I don’t know what else. One thing I think I’d do in the future is to have a standard time every week (I’ve been trying different times), though that will be challenging for me with my travel schedule. I don’t have to be there though. I’m not sure.
Any suggestions on any of the above are much appreciated.
In general, I remain excited about P2PU and the broader application of peer learning combined with open content. My mind is spinning out lots of other course ideas. (I’m doing another project on teaching online that I will retain and open license the rights to. Would love to put it on P2PU though I might look to someone else to facilitate or co-facilitate.) There is so much potential to this model. And money to fund it too.