{"id":759,"date":"2011-09-28T09:27:27","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T16:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/?p=759"},"modified":"2011-09-28T09:27:27","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T16:27:27","slug":"exuberance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/759","title":{"rendered":"Exuberance!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m re-experiencing the excitement of the first week in <a href=\"http:\/\/p2pu.org\">P2pU<\/a> courses! Introductions, goal-setting, comments, and posts flying around so fast it&#8217;s impossible to keep up. It&#8217;s really awesome.<\/p>\n<p>Because I know the time will go by quickly, I want to get some quick, possibly random thoughts down on the P2PU School of Ed.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We have had <strong>incredible initial excitement <\/strong>(social media, press, etc.) about the School of Ed. Clearly, this addresses some real need. That is gratifying.<\/li>\n<li>As in other P2PU courses (in my experience at least; metrics anyone?), our participants include a diverse group including <strong>many international folks <\/strong>and several non-educators. This is interesting in light of the fact that being a U.S. educator was a pre-requisite for all these courses. (This was a stipulation made in part because of our funding for the project. It&#8217;s something I had ambivalence about, and I&#8217;m glad that our enrollments have ended up such that we could include these folks. Our classes will be richer because of it.)\n<ul>\n<li>We spent a lot of time on the &#8220;full descriptions&#8221; of these courses as a recruiting and information tool upfront. In hindsight, I&#8217;m not sure many folks read these.<\/li>\n<li>A question that is gnawing at me is about sign ups from participants who a) aren&#8217;t in the &#8220;target group&#8221; (educators), and b) don&#8217;t answer the sign-up questions, and c) don&#8217;t respond to requests to do so. If the class isn&#8217;t full, should everyone just be accepted regardless? I&#8217;m not sure.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Otherwise in terms of enrollment, we&#8217;ve had significant groups of professional development providers and educators from non-traditional schools (primarily online ones). Statistics to come, but it seems to be an <strong>&#8220;early adopter&#8221; crowd<\/strong>. Not surprising, I guess, though several of our topics are not technology related. (This\u00a0 phenomenon is evident in OER in general as well.)<\/li>\n<li>We have had significantly <strong>more followers than participants <\/strong>sign up. (Is this typical? Don&#8217;t know. Need metrics.) I suspect that this is in part due to our courses&#8217; relatively heavy workload and our request for a strong commitment.<\/li>\n<li>Many folks who signed up <strong>didn&#8217;t complete the sign up task<\/strong>. I suspect that&#8217;s due to a combination of factors, including confusion with the multiple layers of questions and long sign up tasks. (Possibly of interest: I didn&#8217;t experience this in my last non-ed P2PU class.)<\/li>\n<li>Surprisingly, <strong>we have not been flooded with more enrollments than we could accept <\/strong>(class sizes are good, but not oversubscribed).\u00a0 Again, this is different from my other P2PU experience. I suspect the reasons are many:\n<ul>\n<li>Less than idea timing &#8211; The beginning of the school year (in the U.S.) is a busy time.<\/li>\n<li>General lack of time on the part of teachers<\/li>\n<li>Incentives &#8211; In the U.S., much PD is accompanied by payment (stipends) and\/or formal credit. We offer neither at the School of Ed currently, and this is something to think about, especially if the goal is to attract more &#8220;mainstream&#8221; teachers. This is one of the things keeping me awake at night right now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>marketing <\/strong>aspects of all this has been fascinating. It&#8217;s been interesting to see things like a conversation on Twitter turn into enrollments from New Zealand and groups from one school signing up together.<\/li>\n<li>We are sticking with our <strong>enrollment deadlines <\/strong>(though stretching them out a bit until just after the courses actually begin), but I keep wondering if open and rolling enrollment could work, especially with less structured and collaborative courses than ours currently are.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Things I&#8217;ll be watching for as we move ahead:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How participation proceeds, especially around the dreaded &#8220;week 3&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Participation metrics correlated to sign-up task strength (In my past course, there was not as much correlation as I&#8217;d expected. That&#8217;s interesting, huh?)<\/li>\n<li>Use and effectiveness of various tools we&#8217;re using (both in and out of P2PU itself)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There&#8217;s much more, but I&#8217;ll be continuing to write as we go and hope that the other School of Ed facilitators and the P2PU community at large chimes in too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m re-experiencing the excitement of the first week in P2pU courses! Introductions, goal-setting, comments, and posts flying around so fast it&#8217;s impossible to keep up. It&#8217;s really awesome. Because I know the time will go by quickly, I want to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,62,39,46],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-p2pu","tag-p2pued","tag-pd","tag-professional-development"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6mlV-cf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}