Open online learning in local face-to-face groups - revisiting P2PU

I love the idea of combining the advantages of open online education with local support and social context? Maybe we have to separate the roles of the course/content providers at the macro level and the teachers/facilitators at the micro level. One way to do this is allowing local groups to take and adapt course material from major providers like universities and then run local on-site study groups to work through that material and add local context. This is already happening using MOOCs with local support in the form of MOOC meet-ups and refugee support initiatives such as Kiron.

Another interesting example that I have recently rediscovered is P2PU (Peer-to-peer university). At first the idea was to allow people to create short open online courses based on collaborative learning and without a strict syllabus. Learners had freedom to investigate and share ideas and in many cases some or all of them even arranged physical meetings at a mutually convenient location. Those physical meetings proved so powerful that they have now become the core of P2PU's activities.

Today, P2PU focuses on fostering local physical study circles and the online element is for the course material. Over the years they have built up a repository of online courses and more are being added. These courses then form the resources for local study circles that meet regularly in libraries or community centres. You can start a local study circle and choose to study one of the existing online courses or create your own online course in the free open source P2PU platform (thus adding it to the common repository). Study circle facilitators can learn how to run a circle by taking part in an online training course and there are also regular training sessions in a number of major cities, mostly in North America and Europe.

P2PU has three core values: peer learning, community and equity, and their mission statement is:

P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education.

We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish.

This model seems to combine open online education with local support and context and allows for study circles to use the online resources in different ways, adapting the concepts to their own situation and discussing in their own language. Today's MOOCs tend to be top-down approaches with a fixed schedule and little room for adaptation at local level. An alternative is to create the courses, leave them open and add facilitator guidance modules to help people start study circles who base their meetings on the online course but where the interaction is mostly face-to-face in a trusted group. By designing MOOCs for local adaptation and delegating responsibility the courses can gain greater impact, increased diversity and higher completion rates. But it also entails giving up control and daring to delegate.