Peer to Peer University (P2PU)

What is P2PU P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education. We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish. P2PU is a distributed organization, incorporated as a 501(c)3 in the United States. Our network stretches the globe, with our heaviest concentration of work currently happening in Canada, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States. We strive to model our educational values in our organizational structure; as such, we set goals and make decisions collectively as a community. We invite you to join our virtual community and view our governance guidelines, annual goals, and policies (as well as all source code) on Github. History P2PU was born out of the 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration and has been active in the field of open education ever since. Founded by Philipp Schmidt, Delia Browne, Neeru Paharia, Stian Haklev, and Joel Thierstein, P2PU was originally driven by the belief that with adequate social support, anyone can learn almost anything online for free. This strategy reached tens of thousands of learners in more than 50 countries across a number of projects and collaborations, including The School of Webcraft (with Mozilla), School of Open (with Creative Commons), Mechanical MOOC (with MIT), and Play With Your Music (with NYU and Peter Gabriel). P2PU also pioneered early massive open online courses through it’s courses platform and developed some of the first open badge prototypes in collaboration with Mozilla. In 2014, P2PU made a strategic decision to stop working exclusively online because we were not reaching people who stand to benefit the most from the promise of free and open online education. In hopes of reaching new audiences, we partnered with Chicago Public Library to run in-person study groups for library patrons who wanted to learn together. This project became known as learning circles, and over the course of 18 months, P2PU and CPL managed to dramatically increase completion rates and reach new audiences who were new to both online learning and postsecondary education. Learning circles also formed strong social bonds for citizens from diverse backgrounds who shared common goals, and helped to highlight the library as a hub for community learning experiences Given the success in Chicago, P2PU created an open source learning circle toolkit that is now being used by library systems and community centers around the world. Through learning circles, we have maintained our vision of providing viable alternatives to mainstream higher education with a deeper commitment to equity, access, and empowerment. All of our learning circle materials and community tools are openly-licensed and free to use. You can get started with learning circles today. Values P2PU is driven by three core values: Peer learning Underlying our work is the conviction that learning is a social activity. We believe that every person develops expertise through their own life experiences, that people learn when they share and connect with others, and that feedback is necessary in order to improve. Community P2PU is a community-centered project, which is reflected across our organization from learning circles to our governance model. We involve learners and collaborators in all stages of the design and delivery of our work, and believe that sustained learning communities are created through grassroots collaboration, not hierarchical mandates. Equity Equity in learning is only possible when we recognize education as a social good rather than a commodity. A prerequisite to this value is a commitment to working openly, leaving the commons better off than we found it. However, creating space for access is not enough. Systemic injustice means that access does not equal equity, and we must actively design for inclusion and accessibility at every step along the way.