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Read & Watch

Suggested timing: 35 minutes

A quick history of online learning

On March 20, 1728, an advertisement appeared in the Boston Gazette offering shorthand writing lessons. What made this advertisement unique is that it wasn’t meant exclusively for Boston residents, but rather for “Person in the Country desirous to Learn this Art”. The instructor, Caleb Philipps, was proposing to send weekly lessons to people across the United States through the mail service, allowing anybody to learn from him “as perfectly as those that live in Boston”.

This advertisement set a tone of overpromising and under-delivering that has largely persisted in distance education over the ensuing 300 years, whether the format be radio, television or the internet. Throughout history, many of the successful distance learning programs, whether it be the Chautauqua Movement, Open University, or Ivan Ilich’s learning webs, have ensured that distance education is always rooted in a distributed network of in-person meetings.

Over the past twenty years, the vision for free learning resources online has largely unified under the banner of Open Educational Resources, or OER. While there are many definitions of OER, one thing they have in common is that OER must reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

Around 2008, a few individuals and institutions began to take OER one step further. Instead of just sharing learning materials online, people started “running” free online courses, where learners from around the world could sign up and work through course materials together as an online community. These experiments were coined as MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The term “MOOC” has lost a lot of currency over the past few years (many things that get branded as MOOCs are neither massive nor open), but that doesn’t mean they are any less popular. According to Class Central (a MOOC search engine and review site), 110 million people participated in 13,000 online courses in 2019.

Common types of online courses

Online courses come in all sorts of varieties. They might be authored by subject-matter experts, faculty members, learning designers, or hobbyists. They might be hosted on somebody’s personal website, or they might be part of a broader university effort. Some courses are OER, meaning that they come with a license that allows for both re-use and adaptation, while others are free to use but maintain copyright, preventing users from remixing the course materials to better address their own needs. There are four common types of courses that we encounter in learning circles:

  • Courses that carry an open license are known as Open Education Resources or OER. OER is not only free to access, but also allows for repurposing by users. This means we can host old versions, translate activities, and adapt materials for use in new contexts. We prefer working with OER because we know we will always retain the right to access these materials.
  • Courses that are free but not open comprise the vast majority of courses currently used for learning circles. While the quality of these courses is often good, there is a risk that these courses might not always be around, as they sometimes get taken offline or put behind paywalls.
  • Free/open-access tools and databases can serve as the foundation of a great learning circle. Facilitators have developed light curricula around these tools to help create a group environment.
  • Proprietary courses charge licensing fees in order to access materials. While we don’t allow for learning circles to charge learners to participate, oftentimes libraries and school systems will have existing contracts with these vendors, and in this case, it’s fine to run them as a learning circle. If you choose a course from a proprietary vendor, you’ll be able to run a learning circle with it but the course will not be visible to others on the P2PU course database.

Searching for courses

Learning circle participants come together around a common interest, supported by freely accessible learning materials. As the facilitator, it is your job to identify these materials before the learning circle begins.

Most facilitators use online courses as the subject material for their learning circles because online courses are generally: (1) freely available (2) developed by subject matter experts, and (3) designed in a linear format that is easily adaptable to group study. There are, however, many things that an online course cannot do. It cannot understand you as a person, it cannot make decisions for you, and it cannot tell you when you need to look elsewhere to find what you are looking for. Additionally, free online courses are a mixed bag: they aren’t always free, they aren’t always developed by experts, and the format doesn’t always support learning circles.

So for all of these reasons, we try to avoid looking for the “perfect course”: it simply does not exist! All we can do is try to find the best materials around to help your specific community of learners reach the goals that they have set out to achieve.

Don’t worry if you can’t find a course that you like on P2PU’s course page, because anybody with a P2PU account can add new courses to the P2PU database at any time using this form. Some of our favorite places to search for new courses are:

  • Open Culture, a blog that stays up-to-date highlighting free online courses from around the web.
  • Class Central, a search tool that allows you to search for certain subjects by a number of different filters including start date and course rating.
  • Of course, you can also simply search on Google or any other search engine for “free online course in (whatever topic you want)”.
  • Finally, we keep a fairly up to date list of popular courses providers on our website. You can review this to find providers who you may not have heard of before.

Evaluating courses

You do not need to be an expert in the course material in order to facilitate a learning circle. However, whether you are looking on P2PU’s course database or elsewhere on the web, you’ll want to review the course before you create a learning circle. A few key points to consider when evaluating courses:

  • Is the course free and do you expect that all resources will remain available for the duration of the learning circle? (A Creative Commons license is a good sign!)
  • Is the course self-paced? If there is a set start and end date, does it align with your schedule?
  • 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 yes, do you have these resources available?

If you are struggling to choose between a few courses, P2PU has a detailed rubric that you can use to evaluate and compare courses for learning circles.

Adapting courses

Once you’ve searched for courses and evaluated them, the final step is to adapt them for learning circles. As we mentioned in the first module, not all online courses are as learning circle friendly as this one is, so as a facilitator, you’ll need to take steps to adapt the course to the learning circle format. So, what exactly, makes a course work well for learning circles?

In September 2019, we asked this question to learning circle facilitators who joined us at Boston Public Library for our annual gathering. Here’s what we came up with:

Creating new courses

In some cases, facilitators have created their own courses. Here’s a few examples of what that can look like:

Tinkercad in Cambridge, MA

https://www.flickr.com/photos/154503920@N05/33665932088/in/pool-p2pu/ Suzannah, a librarian in Cambridge, MA, ran a few instances of a learning circle about Tinkercad, the free web-based 3D modeling software. Tinkercad is not a course, however, it’s just a tool. But after running two learning circles, Suzannah was able to put together a curriculum for running a 4 week learning circle about Tinkercad, which she then shared on our community forum for other facilitators who are interested in Tinkercad.

Fiction Writing in Boston, MA

https://live.staticflickr.com/1781/42872938912_79fe091090_k_d.jpg Across the Charles River, Jordan, a librarian in Boston, MA, was unsatisfied with the free options for fiction writing courses. Being a writer herself, she made a Wordpress site and then built a course on fiction writing for beginners that was specifically designed for an 8 week learning circle. The course was so successful, that she has since made two additional courses: one about world building and the other about writing a series. All three of these courses are now available on the P2PU courses page. If you want to read more about this, Jordan’s experience was featured in The Writing Platform, an online community for writers, in 2019.

There is of course no obligation to create your own course to run a learning circle. However, if this is something that interests you, we encourage you to check out Course in a Box, the open source tool for creating online courses that we developed. We used Course in a Box to create this course, and we’ve also worked with partners to create other courses that are designed for learning circles, such as Making and Learning.

Additional readings & resources

If you’re interested in going deeper and learning more about some of the topics covered in this session, we recommend the following resources:

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