Hi @1L2P,
I see. That does make sense in relation to what you have explained regarding the overall strategy.
Could I ask, what is the vision for P2PU? What is its aim? I know this seems a strange question, but it is something I have been wondering about recently.
Regards,
Ralfe
maybe Vanessa can chip in. I think they are currently talking strategy, and Vanessa has some nice ideas to focus more on community building, and seeing courses as gateways to the learning community. She, and I, was inspired by cool community learning/doing platforms like DIY.org and Scratch. Wonder what @vanessa has to say about this.
Hi,
One of the reasons I asked the question was because this year I commenced with an Open Masters programme, and I decided to use course creation as an assessment mechanism for the twelve masters modules I will be taking over the next two years. I started this year off with working on the Mathematics of Computer Science course which I am planning on completing towards the middle of February. I created two “prerequisite” courses at the end of last year as well, which were well received. As I will be creating quite a few courses with large amounts of content, I was surprised to learn recently that P2PU’s strategy is shifting, such that course content will no longer reside on the P2PU platform. I thus wonder if the time and effort I am putting into the use of the P2PU platform would, in the long term considering the changing strategy, be better spent on a different platform. So, I just want to understand where P2PU is headed, strategically, so I don’t waste a lot of time creating courses on Lernanta, and will later need to migrate somewhere else.
Regards,
Ralfe
Hey Ralfe
I’ll leave the whole P2PU vision for @1L2P or @Carl to lay out, but I wanted to say that you don’t need to worry about us dropping the P2PU platform like a hot potato.
Going forward we want to make it easier for people to create great open online courses. Part of this is that we would like to give people freedom when needed and help them leverage the web as a platform. As an example: there are many great ways to track web analytics, but for current courses on p2pu.org there are no data available. There has been many other requests for things/features for which good solutions already exist, but which we couldn’t deliver in a platform that caters to everyones needs.
We are in the process of investigating some options for courses in the future. Some of the options we are looking at is jekyll hosted on github pages. Part of our considerations are whether we can export existing content there. I’m not saying this is going to be it - we are still investigating.
If we do use something like this for courses, what would your concerns be?
ps. this feels like a different thread again
Hi Ralfe
To follow on from Dirk’s comments, we are thinking about the future of Lernanta not because P2PU is swerving off in some new direction but because we think we may be able to better support the creation and spread of great peer-learning experiences by means other than ongoing development of our own platform.
Basically, Lernanta has been & remains a great tool for our community, but we’re concerned the cost of keeping it great may be more than our fantastic-but-tiny dev team can carry, ad infinitum - or at least not without sacrificing their ability to explore other solutions as well. Ongoing support, maintenance & feature requests are eating up resources at a time when our team can see lots of great-and-possibly-even-better-than-Lernanta alternatives that we’d like to be able to share (, support, and perhaps even package) for our community.
Exploring some of those alternatives is something we really want to do this year. As Dirk says, it’s all still at the watch-this-space stage. Some of our upcoming projects will involve us trying new things (as they always do I guess!), and as the year progresses we will be engaging with our course creator community as to what might work better for them in future - a Lernanta facing possible development-freeze? a P2PU-supported web as platform approach? something else? However Lernanta is not about to go dark.
We want to continue being a place where course creators can find inspiration and solutions. Supporting our existing Lernanta community, while continuing to share new and better ideas for how to solve online learning problems, is a key part of that.
Hope that helps a little!
Hi @Carl,
Thank you for the reply and the clarification. If lernanta is potentially not going to be supported going forward, is there another platform which course creators could create courses with which can then be interfaced with P2PU? Or is there no alternative to Lernanta at the moment?
Regards,
Ralfe
Hey @ralfe
We are currently experimenting with a few options like Jekyll for Github pages and Wordpress. We are also thinking hard about how to preserve a good experience for creators and learners. You can have a look at https://github.com/p2pu/jekyll-course-template which is an early draft and https://github.com/p2pu/school-of-webmaking which is more concrete.
At the moment I’m still collecting my thoughs about it, there are several things that haven’t been resolved yet like i18n, making sure creating a course like this is easy and how to list courses.
Just to be clear, we are comitted to implimenting a easy pathway from current P2PU courses to whatever solution we settle on, so creating a new course on p2pu.org wont be wasted effort.