Key ideas

Looks at relationship between students and facilitator in three P2PU courses, finds “instructor behavior”, but also different models of interacting with students / student participation etc. Only short abstract - need to find full thing.

Community of inquiry framework (Garrison and Anderson), perspectives from online communities and social media.

Relationships of mentors, volunteer tutors and engaged students during the running of courses.

• Cyberpunk literature
• Creative non-fiction writing
• Copyright for educators

• Observational logs with participants

• Self‐representation: personal narratives and descriptions of self, motivations and incentives
• Social presence & participation: in assigned activities, contribution of alternative perspectives; attendance to others’ experiences and reflections; sharing of cognitive and social resources; collective sense­‐making
• Focused messaging & affective feedback: supportive and constructive exchanges, credit, humor

The role of the instructor or course organizer adheres a cooperative model (Boud and Miller, 1996; Burge, 1994), reflected in

• the aggregation and filtering of materials
• the evolution of pedagogical modeling

Negotiated both prior to, and during, the running of the courses.

‘Instructor behaviour’ (providing structure, pacing and often focusing) is evident across the three courses in the design and management of discussion(s) on resources and assignments.

Other supporting behaviour appears to vary.

In the Creative writing course expert guidance and contributions is more prevalent, in the form of technical and constructive feedback (e.g. through grading) and individualized and content‐related messages.

In the Cyperpunk course on the other hand, there’s evidence of students actively seeking to share control with the organizer in the co-designing of activities, producing more intense engagement and independence.

The Copyright for educators’ course, has similarities to a workshop with tutor presence and distributed mentorship balancing purposeful communication and collective construction of meaning through sustained reflection.

The courses under study promote a participatory infrastructure, that not only can make the process of learning transparent, but also represent a relationship between teaching and learning in an open fashion

• Seely-Brown and Adler, 2008: participatory learning infrastructures
• distributed mentorship