Drumbeat/Challenges/p2pu

Title

Open Web Career Track:
a collection of P2PU courses for people who want to learn open web skills

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.

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 pilot is in the works in order to hack the formal closed accreditation system. 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 that makes sense in the knowledge economy). 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.

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.

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
  • 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

Donation Target and Ask

• Raise $5,000 by March 2009 to compile and edit the learning materials
• Mozilla will match w/ additional $5,000 once goal has been met

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

Timeline and Milestones

• Feb 2010 - Launch pilot course
• 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