# Participation statistics of CSCL intro


**The course**

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.16.33-PM.png "Screen shot 2011-06-20 at 8.16.33 PM")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.16.33-PM.png)During
the past eight weeks, [Monica Resendes](http://reganmian.net/monica) and
I facilitated [a
course](http://p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/)
called "Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative
Learning" on [P2PU](http://p2pu.org). We are both interested in
developing a research agenda around open courses, although this first
course did not have an explicit research design or research questions.
We approached it as a "baseline", to get an idea of how it is to
facilitate courses on P2PU, and also to try out some ideas regarding
design and organization.

I can certainly say that I learnt a huge amount from the course, both
from the actual content of course (all the course participants were
scarily brilliant, lot's of great insights in the blog posts and
discussions!), and from the experience of facilitating the course in
itself. Having been so close to the runnings of P2PU from the very
beginning, and having worked closely with many course organizers, I was
actually surprised at how much I learnt - but I did. Being a course
organizer yourself is a whole different experience.

Part of it is the change of focus. Earlier, I thought of technical
changes in terms of all the different courses, how much support it would
need, how much in demand a feature was etc. But when you are a course
organizer, you have laser-focus on your own course, and what it needs.
And you've spent a lot of time developing the ideas, imagining a vision
of how the course will go, etc. (Of course, it becomes interesting when
this vision is not the same as the students' vision of how the course
should run, which I will blog about later).

**Lessons learnt**

Anyway, last week the course ended, and now we are thinking about what
we have learnt. We posted five simple questions for all the active
participants:

-   What was the best thing about this course?
-   Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?
-   Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
-   How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
-   How could the different tools and communication channels work
  better?

and we've got some great answers in [this
thread](http://p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/wk8-final-week-course-wrap-up-reflection),
and Martin also replied on [his
blog](http://kaffeikampala.blogspot.com/2011/06/intro-to-cscl.html).

**Participation**

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/people.png "people")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/people.png)Monica
and I are planning to do more analysis of the participation patterns
etc, and we are currently preparing a survey to send out to "followers",
but I did a quick count of participation statistics for the people who
signed up to "participate" in the course.

Of 13 participants (plus Monica and I, who also participated actively in
all activities, but whom I have not included in these statistics), there
were two whom we never heard from again after they were admitted to the
course (one of whom has not done anything else on P2PU either, the
single item in their activity feed is being admitted to the course).
Apart from those two, a further five students "left us" during the first
few weeks (one actually posted a message stating that she was not able
to keep up due to other commitments, the others just "faded away").

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.14.41-PM.png "Screen shot 2011-06-20 at 8.14.41 PM")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.14.41-PM.png)That
left us with six students who were fairly active, and committed to the
very end. Together with the course organizers, the eight of us have
become a pretty tight-knit community, and really enjoyed the ride
together. We've participated in different ways, one was never able to
make the Saturday group chats, whereas most of the others did, some have
used the forums on P2PU actively, others preferred their own blog, one
never blogged, but made every single group meeting, etc. But they were
all fairly active almost every week of the course, from the start to the
end.

I know this is a very simplified analysis, but it also correlates with
what I experienced (although going back to look at the data was useful -
some of the people who signed up but never showed up, I had kind of
forgotten about, but I had also forgotten about some of the people that
were active during week one or two, but then faded out).

[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.04.24-PM.png "Screen shot 2011-06-20 at 8.04.24 PM")](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-20-at-8.04.24-PM.png)I
am really grateful that we were able to finish strong (almost everyone
made it to an amazing meeting in week 7 with guest speaker [Sandy
McAuley](http://www.upei.ca/~amcauley/), and again to the last meeting
this weekend, and every single person of those eight has posted a
reflection on the five questions we asked them). I really didn't want
this course to slowly fade out. While we are all discussing interesting
ways of carrying the course community forwards, including creating a
sort of CSCL "book-club", it's valuable to have some kind of "closure"
for our experience together these eight weeks.

However, I would of course have loved to see more of the about 50% of
people who didn't "complete" the course engage more actively. I myself
was absent from the course for almost two weeks due to travel and an eye
infection, and experienced how hard it was to "reinsert myself" into the
community. At that time, I wrote to several students who had not been
active, and encouraged them in a non-judgmental way to "get back on the
train". I received several positive responses to that message, but
nobody actually did.

I've also written to all the participants who have yet to post
reflections, and asked them to do so - even for people who were not
active at all, I'd love to hear their thoughts. Or - if someone was
reading a lot, but never posted, that's also very valuable information.

**The future?**

Any lessons for the future? Well, although I did [make it quite
explicit](http://p2pu.org/en/groups/introduction-to-the-field-of-computer-supported-co/content/how-to-participate-in-this-class-2/)
what kind of participation I expected of "core participants", there was
no way of linking to this from the sign-up page, when the course was
getting started, so I had no guarantee of students having read it.  (I
really hope this will be fixed before I run another course). I'm also
thinking that perhaps next time, I will make the sign-up question a bit
"harder" - not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of engagement. For
example, by asking students to read one article, and post some thoughts
about it on their blog. That way, they have to do something a lot more
active than just clicking "subscribe", and two sentences about their
interest, and I'll already have their blog URLs.

On the other hand, there were 7 people who applied to the course and did
not provide enough information. I asked them to do so, but they never
responded. (It's possible that they did not receive the notification).
Perhaps if I had let some of them in, they would have gotten interested,
and would have participated more than some of the people who did get
in... Given that participation beyond week 1 was such a strong measure
of completion, perhaps we should do like undergraduate classes, which
let almost anyone sign up for the first two weeks, and then kick people
out who are not active enough.

Of course, I could just open enrolment to anyone - and indeed, maybe the
active group had settled on being exactly the same. I still think there
is a value to having a small group of people who make an explicit
commitment to learning together over a certain period of time, but I
certainly don't think it's the only way to do things.

Stian