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?

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!

[photo source]

Open education as a concept has its roots in open source software and copyleft licensing–they’re united by the idea that creators of content can choose to share their content for free. The end result is better content, because an entire group of interested people all over the world can work on a project rather than just a lone person typing away in an office somewhere.

In open education, things like lectures and course materials are shared for free online. Supporters of the idea believe that professors and universities don’t lose anything by making their information freely available (since most students looking at information online weren’t going to enroll at the institution anyway), and they may gain something valuable–a 16-year-old who teaches herself how to program through online computer science lectures may create the next Facebook/Twitter/Groupon superchild, for instance.

Open education is clearly appealing to people who are locked out of formal education because of cost–and, with college costs rising faster than the median income, this is an increasing portion of the population. But many universities are reluctant to embrace open education because they are holding on to the old university mentality–education is a valuable commodity, and should be shared, but only for students enrolled at the university. If students can access lectures online, what motivation do they have to actually pay tuition? It turns out, there’s a lot–students don’t go to college to learn so much as they go to receive a degree or interact with professors one-on-one. Keeping information locked up doesn’t help colleges retain paying students, but it does prevent people who want to learn from trained professors from doing so.

As a college student myself, I’ve had more than one professor bemoan the fact that any information is available online, and there’s no way to tell whether or not it’s true. The smartest of those professors realize the power that open education gives them: if their lectures are hosted on a university’s domain, and they have a doctorate, students can be sure that the information in the lecture is probably correct–and if a professor is the first to get their lecture on Voltaire/Apache/third gender societies online, they can be the one controlling the tone of the debate for people interested in those topics. Professors (and universities) who refuse to use the internet as a means of distributing content are increasingly going to become irrelevant to the discussion that is happening online.

[photo source]

There are certainly valid debates to be had about how open education content should be licensed–as this post does a wonderful job of proving, the existing open source licenses (the Creative Commons and GNU Public License) aren’t really equipped to handle university materials, and there are ethical and legal questions surrounding the licensing of student-produced content if it’s placed online. But we at Open Study don’t see this as an argument against open education so much as an argument for a real debate about the course that open education will take in the next 5-10 years. And if the debate plays itself out on Open Study itself, so much the better!

[photo source]

One shift will have to be in how we think about students’ ages and life experiences. This article from the Association for Psychological Science about non-traditional students sums it up nicely–teachers have to remember that an experience that favors one group of students over another is unfair and counter to the goals of higher education. If students are brought together online, they may be of all different ages and even from different countries; this may mean that word problems or examples that work for students in college towns don’t work for their classmates who are in the workplace–or in a different country.

One of the ways professors can help students of any age is to focus on lessons which relate to current issues affecting people of all backgrounds. Almost any field has some sort of application (that is, of course, why students are learning about it), and the best professors are those who can show their students why this learning matters. A side-effect of this is that current events–unlike most textbooks or ancient Greek texts–feature people which students can identify with. A student who knows why an academic concept matters to them is a student who will be dedicated to finding out more–these are the students want in their classrooms, and they have to do their part to make that happen.

The article suggests additional community-based assignments for students. For first-generation students, this can help build relationships to business communities in their future fields that they may not otherwise have. Business students can shadow a professional for a few hours, or math students can help tutor high schoolers–these are not terribly time-intensive, and can help students build contacts and network in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Even for distance learners, this can be done: students could go out into their communities and compare notes and analyze the reasons for similarities or differences that they observed.

The very idea of what class time is for is changing, too–and with good reason. Students used to taking in information online can feel frustrated and constrained by a traditional lecture format. Instead, professors (especially in larger universities where physically fitting students into a lecture hall is impossible) are already starting to present lecture content online in the form of narrated powerpoint presentations or videos of lectures that students can watch at their leisure. In-class time can instead be spent on group projects and student presentations–things which encourage interaction between students and each other, as well as students and professors. Students learn better when they are actively engaged in the process, and for in-person learners that’s one of the most engaging uses of class time–so says this article from Barbara Davis at UC Berkley.

When students are doing their learning mostly online, collaboration is still possible, and it’s an important way for students to benefit from each other the way they would in a traditional real-time classroom. Professors need to be creative in how they adapt their technology for online learners: should each student be assigned to post something on the class blog for others to comment on each week? Should small-groups be assigned to IM with each other and present the transcript for the professor or the class? Should the professor assign students to make their own powerpoint lectures to share with the class? What will work for each class is different, but all of these share a common thread: they’re easily done online, and they encourage interaction between the individuals in a class.

Some things about being a college student (and about college students themselves) may be changing, but one thing hasn’t: the most valuable parts of college are the interactions between students and professors, and the interaction between students and their classmates.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow at 12:00 p.m. for another hour with education thought leaders to discuss one of these topics: TwtPoll – What do you want to talk about during this week’s (3/9) #edchat?

See you there!