Finding courses
While you can certainly go site by site and look through what’s available, there are some easier ways to find a course for a learning circle. Firstly, you should know that the P2PU community documents courses that we think work well as learning circles here: https://www.p2pu.org/en/courses/.
From here, you can sort through more than 200 courses that people have used to facilitate learning circles in the past. You can sort by popularity and community ranking, and search by topic.
If you can’t find something on the P2PU site, try an aggregator or search engine that looks at courses across multiple platforms. Some of our favorite places to search for new courses are:
- Open Culture stays up-to-date highlighting free online courses from around the web.
- Class Central has a nice search, allowing you to search for certain subjects by a number of different filters including start date and course rating.
If you find something you like, you can add it to P2PU course database so that other facilitators can find it in the future.
Criteria
When searching for a course, it’s important to keep certain barriers in mind:
- Is the course free and do you expect that all resources will remain available? (An open license like Creative Commons is a good sign!)
- Is the course self-paced? If there is a set start and end date, does it align with your schedule? (Most of the courses on P2PU courses page are-self paced)
- Does the weekly time commitment and duration of the course align with your expectations?
- Does the course require additional resources or software aside from a web browser and a word processor? If the answer is yes, do you have these resources available.
You should also consider the relevance to expected learners, the quality of instruction, coherence as a learning circle, and opportunities to provide course feedback. Here is a breakdown of those additional criteria to consider as well as a template that you can use to sort and rank your own courses.