Can peers really teach one another? Can you learn from someone who does not have the credentials to learn? What if the answer is wrong?  All of these questions are raised when I start talking about peer learning.  Usually I speak in paragraphs addressing all these questions.  Today, I am delighted to just post these two links to peer learning interactions on the OpenStudy site.

So take a look at peer learning in action, online, and between strangers (Links below).  Marvel how well it can work.

Link to the whole exchange is here.  

I loved this one because of the complexity of the question and the trouble that the the answered, Klimenkov helps Smokey work through the answer. Smokey is not embarrassed to ask for help when he does not understand.  Klimenkov draws elaborate diagrams to illustrate the concept and adds  beautifully formatted (Latex plugins make everything look lovely) mathematical expressions.  These took time.  Best of all, he challenges the learner to demonstrate his learning at the end.  He wants to be reassured that the learner has learned something.  Klimenkov is a college student in a far off country.

Link to this exchange

I loved the second one because the expert here, UnkleRhaukus is demanding participation.  He is not ready to provide an answer until the asker has demonstrated his work.  As they work through the problem, the asker, Smokey concludes “ :D that makes me excited. i cant thank you enough !(: ”

Excited that he has mastered this!  That is the power of peer learning, the power to engage the learner.

And then, another user comes in to encourage the asker and compliment him.  Clearly he knows Smokey.  ”You are great to work with.”  he says.

Encouragement from a peer.  Engagement.  Its a happy warm buzz. And then, it is hardly surprising that learning happens. Klimenkov and UnkleRhaukus were once the askers, looking for help.  It was these sort of experiences thatgently dragged them back – this time to help, to answer and to encourage their fellow learners.  Peer learning at its best!

Do you feel the warm glow?

They are here! Your favorite ed-tech startup is livening up October with Certs for OCW courses and headless MOOCs. (Didn’t you ask Santa for this last year?). You told us you wanted to demonstrate your learning, your smarts and your skills to the outside world. For some, these are employers. For others, these are colleges. Now, for all of you, we have a way for you to tell the world that you can tackle a course online, you can stay engaged with it, and of course, embody the OpenStudy Code of Conduct,”Be good. Be helpful. Work together nicely.”

The OpenCourseWare Consortium and the 20Million Minds Foundation are offering these new Certificates of Participation.  They love  OpenStudy (TU Delft blog)and want to offer certificates with our assessment because they feel it will help you get to your next goal. You will find open courses from University of Notre Dame, University of California, Irvine, TU Delft OCW and a headless MOOC around a 20MillionMinds Foundation online textbook. How cool is that? So get started learning with people from all around the world. Earn a Cert over winter break!

How does it work?  Just as in a face to face course, you will have to participate in the course.  Ask questions. Work on assignments and help others as you progress through the material.  Be engaged.  Be active. We will be watching your SmartScore. Want to learn more specifics?  Nuts and bolts? Here they are.

Watch this blog for more of our thoughts on all this.  We have blogged about rethinking assessment and the importance of soft skills.  We are delighted to be doing something about it and bringing more value to you through these certs.

As we throw open the doors of OpenStudy to new learners, we are counting on you, our OpenStudiers to help our new friends. Oh, and do sign up for one of these Certificates!

See you on OpenStudy!

Preetha, CEO

P.S Don’t you love it when users get religious about your site?

Such a lot of buzz about MOOC, a lot of hype but still a lot of promise that has yet to be realized.  Esther Wojcicki said to me over coffee yesterday, “All this fuss about MOOCs and it is just another version of distance learning.”  And we thought about that a bit as we sipped our respective beverages. Yes, in a way, it is another form of delivering course content remotely.  So why all this fuss?  The novelty is partly due to the very large numbers, and partly  due to the completely open access. There are differences of course, as in any Version 2.0 of something.  And yet, what is fascinating and a little irritating, is that the current versions are still far from being optimal, let alone perfect.

It is empowering to imagine the thousands of happy learners plodding their way through lectures and assimilating knowledge that was never accessible to them before.  The image of a teen in rural India, home from a hard day’s work on the family farm, listening to Sebastian Thrun’s voice emanating from his little tablet, by the light of a single bulb suspended over his wooden cot, is compelling. And then, it spoils the happy glow to read the complaints that only 15% finish, and that there is no interaction, no community, and then there is cheating!

So we have to refine the model.  There is nothing wrong with that.  This is a great new experiment and it will take a couple of tries to get it right.  The potential for empowerment and great impact is there, now we just have to go back to the basics and remind ourselves of what makes a great learning experience.

Its easy to forget that content is not everything.  Having pretty videos and stuff to read does not equal learning.  Neither does adding little quizzes at the end of five minutes of video.  Any educator worth his/her salt will tell you that people learn when they are actively engaged, reflecting, constructing their own understanding, articulating it.  You just have to read the dismal statistics on education, on high school or college dropouts to know that lectures and powerpoints alone will fail to get people to really learn new material.  Its the interaction, the collaboration, and  the exchange that drives engagement and ultimately learning.

So what do I like about the next version of the MOOC offered by  the combined creativity of MIT/OCW,P2PU,OpenStudy and Codecademy’s ?  I like it and here is why.  For one, it deemphasizes the importance of the content.  Yes there is content, but that is not what it is all about.  The content is reasonable, no one could call it “pretty” or “slick”!  What is remarkable is that the organizers, Steve Carson and Philip Schmidt realized that it would take more than passive content to make the learning happen.  So in addition to the content, there are three important aspects to this MOOC.

One is the Codeacademy platform to practice what you learned.  (As a Chemistry educator, I am deeply envious of this, we need a Codecademy for every subject on the planet and can we start with Chemistry please Zach?) The learner gets to try out their code and really engage with this material, in a friendly and nonthreatening environment.  Then I really like the weekly call-to-action emails that the P2PU team is going to send out will keep learners organized, on track and moving along.  And the finally, and by far the most important is the community that is already building up on OpenStudy study group for this MOOC. This learning community is going to make all the difference.

Relationships will build up as Gopal from Gandhinagar and Amina from Cairo and Erik from Helsinki ask for help and get help.  As the relationships build up, they will start to support one another and then keep one another motivated to keep coming back.  The best outcome of all, they will engage each other in active learning.  We have seen this time and again on OpenStudy and have measured increased learning outcomes for our NextGeneration Learning Challenge grant.  And I predict we are going to see it again in this MechMOOC.  Why, I predict we are going to see a >20% retention for this experiment!

Preetha.

*This was originally posted at Dr. Preetha Ram’s ‘Innovation in Education’ blog, found here.

They are one-dimensional, subjective, non-standardized and unreliable. Most teachers would agree that there are better ways to evaluate students and assess their progress.  Students stress about grades and all agree that it kills collaboration and sharing. And yet we keep using them.  April is the time of year when colleges decide who to admit into their hallowed ranks.  This is the time when the panic about grades, GPAs and scores hits an all-time high.  Studies of Kuh, Pascarella & Terenzini, and others have established quite clearly that student engagement rather than grades is the most significant predictor of student success and retention. Engaged students are the ones who raise their hands in class to ask questions, who chat with their classmates, and who stay back to interact with their teachers.  They are the ones who join clubs, participate in sports, find a cause to champion, volunteer, and who help out in the community. This is important, right? Well then, where is this included in the curriculum and where does it appear on the transcript?

When was the last time you were offered a job based on your college transcript? When employers sift through entry-level applicants, they look beyond the GPA for evidence of teamwork, passion, problem solving, communications. And yet you will not find any of these attributes on the college transcript. These skills are developed during experiences outside the classroom: experiential learning, problem based learning, real life experiences, projects, co-ops. Our learner faces two challenges—to pick the right experience to learn these skills, and to produce credible documentation of these skills.

Today’s world is dynamically changing, technologically evolving, highly global, constantly online, and demandingly collaborative. Do we have educational experiences to train our young learners for this brave new world, a connectivist world where Google places encyclopedia facts at a eight year old’s fingertips, where online chats connect an Atlanta coed with an Ankara teen in seconds, a world where notions of privacy are being challenged by texting tweens. At OpenStudy, we asked ourselves what environment would make it is easy and fun for learners of all ages to prepare themselves for the new tomorrow? Our answer: Open Social Learning.

OpenStudy’s first disruptive innovation was to enable peer learning.  We set out to prove that learning could occur in an open social platform that offered peer learning help. The platform exceeded expectations. It has grown to over 100,000 users from 170 countries, and it offers a free, scalable, 24/7 learning help that users report is “addictive”. 80% of surveyed users report improved learning outcomes.

But there is more.  I’ve written countless letters of recommendation to help students apply for jobs, graduate school, and medical school by evaluating and documenting soft skills. I could see something remarkable emerge on our peer learning platform. Students began building and demonstrating these very skills. They learned to articulate their questions and answers, to maintain courtesy and openness, to work together in teams. They were truly passionate about learning. Some became leaders and offered support and mentoring.

Watching the interactions on OpenStudy, we realized that this ecosystem was just the right environment to develop key soft skills: helpfulness, courtesy, teamwork, problem solving, engagement, to name a few.  Today, OpenStudy is a global extracurricular extraordinaire, experiential learning for the 21st century, with access for all.

SmartScore is OpenStudy’s bold new initiative to challenge the traditional notions of intelligence normally quantified by grades. SmartScore will report on skills and competencies demonstrated on our platform that are relevant and meaningful for both student and workplace success. SmartScore is a 21st century version of real world intelligence.

We are hacking education and rethinking evaluation and assessment. You can think of it as going beyond grades. We call it a SmartScore.

Join us for our SmartScore launch on April 17th at the Education Innovation Summit to learn more.

Got your SmartScore?

Our venture OpenStudy is unique. We call it open social learning. Help is always available for all the learners in the world, who raise their hands and ask for help. We offer a highly scaleable, low cost, global solution to the problem of providing learning help through an open social platform for peer-to-peer learning.

We have proven this disruptive model over and over again, to thousands of learners. Today there are 100,000 registered users, from over 40 partnering institutions including a who’s who list of the MITOCWs and OpenYales to the community college systems of West Hills and Piedmont. Our users ask over 1000 questions a day in Math alone and are usually helped within 5 minutes. Our impact on learning: 80% of our users surveyed reported that using OpenStudy had helped them gain a better understanding of their course material. And there are stories like Sergio’s.

Our solution is really blindingly obvious especially to anyone with a teenager. Give them a Facebook like social site and the social interactions will then lead to engagement, the peer to peer learning creates a win-win scenario and users complain happily that they are addicted. Addicted to math! When was the last time you heard that?

As satisfying as this is, there is more. As our users engage with one another, young with old, the middle schooler with the MIT engineer, American, the Pakistani, the Tanzanian, the Turkish, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the black, the white, brown… they learn to interact, be courteous, they learn to be helpful, they learn to work together, to communicate. For the most active of our users, OpenStudy becomes their passion.

Communication, Teamwork, Passion, Helpfulness.

What does that sound like to you?

To us it was apparent that in our social learning platform, we had also created an ecosystem where our users could move beyond subject matter expertise to learning soft skills that matter. They were moving from the mind to the heart. Think of it as learning things that are not captured on a grade. Not only do our users practice these important skills of the heart, we can then report on on what they have learnt. With crowd sourcing, game mechanics and analytics, we can report on teamwork, problem solving, and most of all the elusive attribute, but in a way the most important: passion! You and I know this should have been taught in school, somehow? Right? But tragically, all too often it isn’t.

And finally, this is my core belief. In education, what lies between failure and success is a human. A teacher, a mentor, a friend, a peer. I believe all the technology being developed today will not solve the problems of education if it does not deliberately and purposefully include the social element. And I believe in the power of open social learning systems to solve some of education’s biggest problems.

Here is my Call to Action. Come experience OpenStudy for yourself. Be a Hero to a Sergio. Take 10 minutes to teach 10. And you may well learn something too.

Do you have a story like Sergio’s you’d like to share? Or perhaps you’re the ‘Hero’ in this story? Well, we’d love to hear it! Go to this link and tell us your #Take10Teach10 story!