Open Education in the Wild: The Dynamics of Course Production in the Peer 2 Peer University

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online, open education platform where any user can create a course, contribute content, or join an existing course as a learner. P2PU represents an experiment in organizing the production of entirely user-generated, open education. However, the open model of P2PU rests on the critical assumption that members can successfully coordinate and produce a sufficient supply of courses and motivate others to join in. In this paper, we use log data from P2PU to describe the dynamics of organizers -- members who try to produce and launch open courses -- and explore the factors related to their ability to successfully create courses on this open platform. We find that a critical predictor of successful course development is quickly finding like-minded organizers to collaborate with, suggesting that creating new education systems based on open, social computing platforms requires facilitation of key aspects of social coordination beyond providing platform and content resources.

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