Updates on P2PU Research from UMD

Archive Org
#1

Hello everyone,
First, apologies for being somewhat missing over the last month. It’s been a hectic semester here at UMD, but it starts to end this week (after that gnarly task called grading is completed).

@bekka - we never followed up on me coming to a community call. After my semester ends, Thursdays should now work for me in the coming semester.

Couple of updates on Research Activities from our group at UMD:

----- Data Sharing — Discussion with Nadeem + @bekka stalled in September, about how to proceed with data sharing. However, my student Sarah went ahead and began to prepare some of the tables in the database from the September 2013 data dump to share publicly as CSV files (for now), which we felt were safe to share with the world. We outlined the 6 tables we’ve prepared so far here: http://casci.umd.edu/research-resource/data-resources/p2pu/

Please feel free @dirk and everyone in the community to let us know if we’re on the right track. And if there are other tables that we can whitelist, we can add them to our growing collection.

There continues to be voiced interest by other researchers in accessing open datasets from P2PU. @shaklev mentioned this during a talk I gave about open education research (if you’re curious, slides and video are here: http://cider.athabascau.ca/CIDERSessions/ahn2013/sessiondetails)… and Rosta Farzan, a researcher at PITT has recently requested the data from us; and she and our student Sarah are going to propose a project with this data at the Online Communities Hackathon at CSCW 2014 http://ocdata.umd.edu/.

Any progress we can make on this, and help from the P2PU community, would be excellent; particularly as P2PU shifts its strategy/focus (from what I gathered through personal conversation with Philipp @1L2P when he visited UMD), it would be nice to at least have a snapshop of P2PU that researchers can look at into the future.

----- Some analyses. Our group at UMD is focusing on one analysis right now: understanding what characteristics are correlated to active projects in P2PU and larger enrollment.

We’ll be testing whether (a) designing open training like https://p2pu.org/en/courses/445/how-do-i-make-a-p2pu-course/ + (b) the experience level of organizers + © affiliation with broader initiatives like being in an official school relate to having a good supply of courses in the platform

----- Brian Butler had taken the lead on the mMOOC data (the first 4 launches of it). Latest news is he told me he’d have time to look at it over our winter break, which will be over the next few weeks. I hope we can have something concrete to report asap, as I know you’ve had discussions about moving on with the mMOOC in some form.

Feel free to send any questions or suggestions!

Happy holidays everyone!

1 Like
#2

This is wonderful, @ahnjune.
we’ll be having community calls right up until the holidays, so if would be great if you could join us. How about this Thursday ( 19th)?

As for the data sharing, from a licensing perspective, I think the new CC 4.0 licences pretty much cover things from the access side of things.
And the datasets that Sarah has prepared look amazing. I’d love to spread the word about these, and see what kinds of things people might find in there.

#3

@bekka

Hahaha. That’s the one day I can’t do. One of my students is defending his dissertation, so I should be there.

When is the first community call in January?

CC 4.0 sounds good. If everyone is ok, I will ask Sarah to get the datasets ready for public download. Give us the go and we’ll be ready to share them out. :smile:

#4

May I suggest a few more that I think will be usefull

  • courses_course
  • courses_cohortsignup ( may need bridge table courses_cohort to make this usefull)
  • content2_content & content2_contentversion ( and also courses_coursecontent to make it usefull)

I assume that password, email and confirmation_code will be removed from users_userprofile? I can’t remember what we said about personally identifyable stuff since the information is already accesible on the web?

#5

Yes, that’s a very good reason for not being in our call!
We’ll definitely have a call on the 2nd of Jan - so no worries.

And yes, let’s get that data out there! I’m planning a blog post explaining
why we’re doing this, and what you and your team have worked so hard on, so
maybe we can tie those two together. Might be a fun thing to start the New
Year with.

#6

Thanks @dirk!! I’ll ask Sarah to prep these tables as well.

#7

Thanks for understanding @bekka. The 2nd of January (is Wednesday) correct? If you send me an invite, I’ll definitely lock it in on my calendar.

A blog post would be really excellent.

I’ll see when Sarah can get the tables prepped (Dirk added a few more), since she is in finals period and then on Christmas break over these next few weeks. Then I’ll see if she can draft up something so people can understand the tables – there’s a lot of idiosyncratic stuff in there; e.g. you guys moved from the “projects” tables to “courses” tables; so someone looking at this data needs to understand how to deal with that data structure. I’m sure there are other things that could go into such a writeup…

Happy holidays!