# New P2PU course: Intro to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning


[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/csclintro.jpg "#csclintro")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/csclintro.jpg)
I have been intimately involved with [P2PU](http://p2pu.org) since the
first courses started in September 2009, working on supporting course
organizers, designing and developing some of the technology, and
thinking about the models of learning interactions that we wanted to
support. However, I have still not taught a single course myself. Time
to change that!

I am currently doing my PhD at [OISE](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca),
University of Toronto, as part of the [Encore
lab](http://encorelab.org/). Our work is located within the field of
[Computer-Supported Collaborative
Learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-supported_collaborative_learning),
a very fascinating field which I have been spending the last year
getting into, and whose [major
conference](http://www.isls.org/cscl2011/index.htm) I will attend for
the first time this summer in Hong Kong. However, when getting into this
field, I faced one challenge - OISE does not offer any courses directly
on CSCL. Instead, you have to kind of "pick it up" by talking to fellow
students, and your supervisor, doing the core readings yourself, etc.

I figured this would be a great topic for a P2PU course. Much of the
foundational literature in the course is open access (both because it is
a relatively young field, and because many of the core researchers
support OA - [the core journal in the field](http://ijcscl.org/) is
entirely OA, for example, meaning that we would be able to link to key
readings without worrying about people being able to access them). In
addition, the idea behind P2PU is "peer-learning", and this would be a
true example: I am not organizing this course because I am an expert,
but because I want someone to learn with.

I was lucky enough to find Monica Resendes, a PhD student with [the IKIT
lab](http://ikit.org/), also at OISE/University of Toronto. It's been
very interesting discussing our different ideas about how we should
approach this, and I really appreciate not doing this by myself.

To get a feeling for the field, we began by surveying the key academics
(as identified by being on the board of ijCSCL, the annual conference
committee, etc) and looking at the people who had posted their syllabi
online. [We found about fifteen faculty](http://pad.p2pu.org/cscl-intro)
who had done this (and often they had course syllabi going ten years
back, many times with open wikis so we could see their students' work as
well). This gave us a sense of how core faculty see "the field", and
which topics we should cover. There was much more than could be covered
in an eight-week course, so we decided to create a separate "analysis
and assessment" course, which will hopefully run sometime in the fall.

We began writing up [a course outline on Google
Docs](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CH4hTowgZxIEE4KpXCrHLytzyTQKoj85_jbRpoVvY_w/edit?hl=en),
with tentative readings, and a structure for the course. We are doing
some interesting things with
[badges](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/how-to-participate-in-this-class/)
(see also [our current badge platform](http://badges.p2pu.org), and the
[badge whitepaper](http://bit.ly/badgepaper4)), as well as with [core
and network
participants](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/how-to-participate-in-this-class-2/),
inspired by the [Wiley wikis](http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/514)
on one hand, and the [Massive Open Online
Courses](http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/12/10/massive-open-online-courses-all-you-need-to-know/)
([more](http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/09/the-wild-world-of-massively-open-online-courses/))
on the other.

I hope you will join us - either as a core participant ([sign
up](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/sign-up/)
is open for another week), or as a part of our network (go to [the
course
website](http://new.p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/),
and click Follow). We would love for the discussions in the course to
take on a life outside of the course - maybe someone will write a blog
entry, record a YouTube video, or edit a wiki page that gets retweeted,
reblogged and discussed about far outside the confines of the course.
The topics should certainly be interesting to a wide variety of folks.

Here is the introductory video (we'll aim to do one of these a week,
usually much shorter though):

Hope to see you, and looking forward to all the conversations!

Stian