Drumbeat/Challenges/p2pu

Title

Open Web Career Track:
An alternative accreditation for open web skills based on completion of a collection of P2PU courses

See also: Mashing Up The Open Web, the first course we'll offer as part of this Drumbeat project

Background

The challenge: Most tech career development courses focus on certification around a single technology (e.g. MCSE or Cisco Academy). The result: students go into their careers knowing one or two tools rather than knowing how to learn and adapt tools on the fly. Also, there is a sense that permission and certification are the keys to tech career success -- but the reality is that creative, entrepreneurial problem solving is much more important. And for web technology the ability to participate in open source projects is crucial. Rarely are these kinds of skills taught in corporate technology courses or even academic degree programmes.

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is planning to offer an alternative to this kind of career development. P2PU helps small groups of motivated learners to compile packages of open learning materials and design and facilitate their own courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and an open credits system is in the works in order to hack formal accreditation. Open web technology is the perfect pilot discipline.

Description

Open Web Career Track is a series of P2PU courses where students collaboratively learn -- and rate each other on -- open web skills. The courses focus both on specific, standards-based technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) and learn-as-you-go problem solving and hacking (the real skill you need to succeed). Individual courses are organized by learners using the P2PU model. The overall program is organized as a Drumbeat project involving both employers (TopCoder?) and online career web sites (LinkedIn?).

In addition to facilitating social learning processes, P2PU is coordinating a group of individuals and organisations interested in building an open credits infrastructure (think of it as an open knowledge currency). It will make it easy for Open Web Career professionals to showcase their skills and expertise to potential employers on personal profile pages. The open credits incubator will be held in mid-2010 and we plan to use open web career for our pilot.

The Open Web Career Track program is particularly focused on regions with high growth technology sectors and a strong bent towards certification. Likely places include: India, East Asia and Brasil. We want peer learning and accreditation to emerge as serious open web career path alternatives in these regions.

Lucian's next draft to include more detail on:

• Mozilla curriculum endorsement to give street cred
• Open work method,, participants produce work that can be seen by the world.
• Alternative accreditation, including peer accreditation and possibility to pay to have your work evaluated and scored

How does this make the web better?

This makes the web better in three ways:

1. More people skilled in the core technologies used to create the open web
2. More people building their careers and skills around openness, creativity, on the fly learning -- the values and approaches needed for the open web to thrive
3. An open credits system that gives recognition to open social learning, reduces the cost of education, and can be applied to other disciplines

Tags

social learning, openweb, p2pu, open credits

Video

Click here to watch video on blip.tv.

Curriculum

We are currently compiling ideas for the core set of open web tech courses. The perfect courses will build skills by using different types of technology to solve real world problems.

• Drumbeat/p2pu/Mashing Up The Open Web - starts March 2010
• Please help us define the curriculum!

Note: idea is to develop Mozilla-endorsed curriculum that covers a wide variety of open web career paths (e.g. web design, app development, etc.).

Curriculum review board

We will assemble a group of respected open web experts to review and endorse the open web curriculum. They will ensure that the overall curriculum and course structure reflect the desired expertise profile of open web developers. The review board will include academics (from traditional institutions) but also community leaders and industry representatives.

Suggested individuals (just ideas for now!):

• Dave Humphrey
• Arun (Mozilla)
• David Weinberger

Goals and metrics (outcome)

need to work on these, especially add metrics ... but here is a start

• Q1 2010 - compile materials, attract leaders and test concept
  • Metrics: at least one course running, clear curriculum exists, leadership in place
• Q2 2010 - scale up, link to companies and career sites, also develop early accreditation framework
  • Metrics: full slate of courses (HTML, JS, CSS plus more business oriented), relationships with potential employers, and career portals
• Q3 2010 - pilot open credits infrastructure
  • Metrics: pilot implementation of open credits for open web careers

Participation asks

• Define learning goals and curriculum outline
  • (what do we think students need to learn)
• Help us find (and improve) an open web tech curriculum
  • (add more granular asks here)
• Start a course or a local study group
• Participate in a course
• Participate as a tutor
• Join as a 'sponsoring employer'
  • Provide feedback on learning goals (what are you hiring for?)
  • Donate staff time for tutoring
  • Will consider candidates once they get to certain level
• Join as a karma channel
  • E.g. show your peer reviews from courses in LinkedIn

Toolset and Platform

• We will use P2PU's existing learning platform, but encourage others to self-host and run courses in parallel
• Learning materials will be compiled into course packages on the P2PU platform. All materials will be openly licensed and not tied into one platform
• P2PU will lead design of the open credits architecture, and offer its platform for open web track participants

Team and Contributors

• John Britton, Flat World Knowledge, USA
• Lucian Teo, web standards advocate, Singapore
• Philipp Schmidt, P2PU and Shuttleworth Foundation, South Africa
• Mark Surman, Mozilla, Canada
• Arun Ranganathan, Mozilla, USA
• Add yourself

Needed: people to design curriculum, run more courses. also, someone to lead development of open credits system.

Timeline and Milestones

• Feb 2010 - Updated vision document (Lucian)
• Feb 2010 - Launch pilot course
• March 2010 - Map of skills and possible courses
• April 2010 - Concept proposed on open accreditation
• June 2010 - Complete open web career track department in P2PU
• May 2010 - Open credits incubator
• XXX - Pilot open credits

Current challenges and questions

• Who's doing stuff in this space already? Do they have open learning materials? Do they want to collaborate?
  • Free Technology Academy (has materials from Open University of Catalunia, which will be made available by end of December)
• How do we bootstrap? W/ interested tutors? Who coordinates?
  • Use P2PU community to identify course organizer for pilot course and
• Do we have a leader / leaders for this? People who know the content? People in the countries where this needs to happen?
  • Brasil:
  • India:
  • South Africa:
• What materials exist that we could draw on? Is there enough that we could run a course tomorrow?
  • There is a lot, but it needs curation

Related projects

• P2P Foundation, a giant resource of P2P info
• Wikiversity, a Wikimedia Foundation project