SOS (School of Science)

[Alan Webb]

Hi everyone,

Rob Ingles, a good friend of mine in DC, is interested if there has been any discussion about a P2PU School of Science.  If so, he would love to help and has some great ideas.  

If not, he would love to get it started!  Based on talking with him about this idea, he's really got the right attitude and the particular experience/passion to take on this kind of a project, especially if there's appetite for supporting him in any way as he does!

Rob took the time to write out some thoughts for why he thinks this should happen, which I've pasted below.  I hope you'll take a look and offer feedback for Rob if you have time.  For the busy I wanted to offer the cliff-notes version at the top:

- Rob has a social sciency BA degree, but then wanted to get into life sciences after he graduated.  The experience of researching and taking science classes in the world outside universities has been enlightening and given him both some ideas and also just enough frustration to want to change the situation for others.

- His really cool idea for a tangible project to help get the idea started is to put together a "collection of interactive, self-grading problem sets in physics, chemistry, and maybe biology" which allow learners to earn badges.  It's easy to imagine these problem sets being designed to complement existing OER video or text snippets and put together as great challenges like Webcraft's.  "The problem sets would be designed to generate slight variations in the questions each time they were viewed (for example, changing the initial velocity of a falling object in a physics problem)..."  Awesome. 

- He is interested in proposing this as a project in the DML competition and sees that as a potential way to get resources to help get the SOS started.

- He and I discussed that there may be ways to get these badges actually authenticated at higher levels by science academic associations (he's given that a lot of thought and willing to do outreach).  For example, he mentions that the "American Chemistry Society publishes a series of nationally standardized final exams for chemistry classes starting at first-year general chemistry and going up to advanced topics like physical chemistry" and imagines that there would be ways to work together with such organizations.

- He envisions badges not just for certifying science knowledge but also for helping identify how good you are at helping teach others science (based on what you are able to help others with in your own learning process), and then using that information to turn those badge-holders into mentors of new learners coming along.

*** In his words ***

Supporting Nontraditional Science Learners through a P2PU School of Science

 

There has been a proliferation, over the past few years, of free online materials for those who want to teach themselves science.  MIT Open Courseware, iTunes U, and Khan Academy have some great video content, and Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative provides a limited but very well-done set of hypertextbook-style “web courses” for independent learners.

 

The question that’s been on my mind – and the question that brings me to write to you all in the P2PU community – is whether something could be added to these video and text resources in order to make it truly possible to learn science online. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot thanks to my personal experiences as a person with a social science B.A. who’s gotten interested in the life sciences and -- as a result -- taken a bunch of biology, chemistry, and physics classes at a DC-area institutions. As a result of these experiences, I’ve become convinced that there has got to be a better way to teach the intro-level sciences than the “in person lectures, problem sets and tests” model that’s currently got a near-monopoly on the field. The current system is expensive – in-state tuition at the “affordable” University of Maryland still runs at around $1,500 per class – and stupidly inflexible. There is no way to speed through material that you’ve already mastered, and no way to slow down due to a busy week at home or work. You also get no official recognition for helping teach your fellow students. 

 

I’m wondering if there’s any way that online, open-source education through P2PU could start to break the brick-and-mortar monopoly on introductory science education. It strikes me that there are two challenges that need to be overcome before free online science learning can compete with traditional introductory courses at colleges and universities.

 

The first challenge lies in giving people the opportunity to practice what they’re learning. You can’t learn physics just by reading a text or watching lectures; you’ve got to actually do physics problems. The same thing goes for chemistry, and – to a lesser extent – biology. You really haven’t mastered the material in the introductory sciences until you’ve learned to solve problems using what you’ve learned.

 

The second challenge lies in making it possible for people to be recognized for what they’ve learned. There are people who want to learn science solely for personal enrichment, and that’s awesome. But there are others who want to use what they’ve learned to get jobs or get into degree programs.

 

I am interested in the possibility of creating a P2PU “School of Science” that could start solving both of these problems. I’m imagining that the project would start with the creation (or curation) of a collection interactive, self-grading problem sets in physics, chemistry, and maybe biology. The problem sets would be designed to generate slight variations in the questions each time they were viewed (for example, changing the initial velocity of a falling object in a physics problem) to make the system harder to game. Learners who completed problem sets would earn badges. Learners could earn a separate set of badges through completing challenge problems – analogous to the challenges available in the P2PU School of Webcraft – and having these challenges evaluated by peers who had achieved a higher level of badging. Finally, a third set of badges would be awarded for helpful advice given to others studying the same subject in the P2PU forums.

 

Anyone who made a certain amount of progress on all three of these “badge tracks” – completing problem sets, receiving positive peer evaluations on challenges, and providing helpful advice to others – would receive a “super badge” attesting that they had mastered the subject at the introductory college level. Eventually, the goal would be for a P2PU “super badge” in chemistry or physics to mean as much as an A in that course on a college transcript.

 

In the meantime, especially for chemistry, there are ways to help P2PU participants receive external validation of their achievement. The American Chemistry Society publishes a series of nationally standardized final exams for chemistry classes starting at first-year general chemistry and going up to advanced topics like physical chemistry. If the right arrangements could be made for proctoring – this would probably have to involve attending an exam administration at a brick-and-mortar university – then P2PU students could take these final exams and receive a percentile score that ranked them among all other chemistry students in the U.S. P2PU could make this score part of the data contained in the student’s chemistry badge, giving the badge an extra measure of external validity.

 

I’d be curious to hear what you folks on this list think of this idea. Do you think it has legs? Are there parts of it that need to be refined? If you like the idea of a P2PU School of Science, I was thinking it would make a lot of sense to submit it as a content proposal in Stage 1 of the HASTAC Badges for Lifelong Learning competition. If we won even a small grant from that competition, it could go a long way towards helping get a P2PU School of Science off the ground.

[rob inglis]

Just realized I wasn't a member of p2pu-schools and thus couldn't send an email to the list. Here's a second attempt. 

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:55 PM, rob inglis <robert....@gmail.com> wrote:

Jessy (and others),

These are great questions! I'm excited by your interest, and of course happy to hear about the UMD connection. I think that we can teach dry, non-interactive ways of learning science to Fear the Turtle. Here are my attempts to answer a few of your questions. This isn't comprehensive, but hopefully can serve as a start. 

What would the SOS do that Khan and MIT OCW aren't already doing? 

The way I see it, there are three steps in mastering a concept in the basic sciences: listening, doing, and proving. First you have to listen to (or read) somebody's explanation of the concept. Then you have to apply and deepen your new knowledge by using it to solve problems. Finally, if you want recognition for what you've learned -- and I'm not saying everybody does -- then you have to prove your knowledge to some trusted authority (a professor, the American Chemistry Society's examination board, etc.).

My take on Khan is that he's doing an awesome job with the first of these three steps: providing clear, accessible explanations of the main concepts in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. But -- with the exception of his math practice problems, which seem to focus on elementary through early high school material -- he hasn't made a foray into the world of providing practice problems for people to test and develop their new knowledge. Which is what brings me to the next question I'll try to answer.

What would be a good place to start?

I think the best way to get started would be to create (or curate) a series of awesome open-source problem sets for intro chemistry or physics. (I'm leaning towards chemistry, because it's my favorite subject.) I'm hoping that the SOS will grow into something more than just problem sets, but I think it's important to provide a valuable service to some group of users as soon as possible in the development process. I think that self learners working their way through Khan lectures would like the opportunity to check their progress. And I am guessing that chemistry or physics teachers at the high school and college levels would find a lot of value in a set of well-crafted, self-grading problem sets they could assign to their students. There are some online problem sets that have already been published by MIT OCW (under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license), Centre College Chemistry Department, Harvard's Evans Lab, and physicsclassroom.com (run by a high school teacher in Illinois). But I think we could do something unique by centralizing these resources, making them interactive and self grading (MIT and the Evans Lab publish their problem sets as text only), and filling in the gaps in their coverage (for example, MIT's coverage of some general chemistry topics is weak).

The other immediate action I think we should be taking is to submit a content proposal in the DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition (this would actually need to be the first action, because the deadline is November 14). Which brings me to the final question I'll try to answer.

Where do you see this going? 

I think that we desperately need a better way for people to receive credit/recognition for science learning that takes place outside the classroom. For some people, the current model of sitting in a big lecture hall and then taking a few tests works well. Other people need more temporal and locational flexibility, or would benefit from frequent low-stakes assessments (or repeat-until-you-get-it-right "no stakes" assessments) as opposed to a few high-stakes tests. Other people would be perfectly happy with lectures-and-testing learning model, but don't have the money to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per class to take part in it.

For all these reasons, I'd like to see the P2PU SOS develop a badging system that recognizes people's progress in learning science through P2PU. I'm imagining badges that recognize:

1. The completion of problem sets

2. The successful completion of publicly announced, time-limited  "challenge" problems similar to the ones produced by the University Physics Challenge

3. Contributions made to other people's learning on the P2PU forums or -- if this is a feasible way to do this -- other places on the internet like Stack Exchange forums

4. In the specific case of chemistry, the successful completion of the American Chemical Society's nationally standardized end-of-course exams.

The goal would be to have universities and employers eventually start recognizing P2PU badges as the functional equivalents of credits from any other institution of higher learning. I think that one way to start down this path would be to get colleges to accept P2PU badges for placing out of introductory courses (i.e. you can skip general chemistry and go straight to orgo if you've got the right set of P2PU badges). They already do this with AP and IB test scores, after all.

These are just a few thoughts to get the ball rolling. I would love to hear what you guys think!

Rob

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Jessy Kate Schingler <je...@jessykate.com> wrote:

woohoo! COMPLETELY up for science classes :) (also, hello from another DC science person at UMD :)).  

my initial thought would be to pick one or two classes and focus on those first-- start small and iterate. think of p2pu as your science lab... for science classes. you can use it as a platform to experiment with initial offerings. it sounds like you have a particular knowledge about the chemistry part, so maybe that is a good place to start?

as for the school aspect, my initial reaction was "HELL yes!" though i feel compelled to play devil's advocate a tiny bit. it should certainly not be seen as a lack of enthusiasm for your contributions or ideas more broadly-- just exploring it.

how is this different from, say, what khan is offering? IIUC you're suggesting that the interactive peer component is missing from khan. can you leverage the content they already offer and then build social aspects around it? (perhaps this is already the plan?)

what would the goals of such a school/set of classes be? would it be expose people to science who aren't otherwise encouraged to learn science? would it be to give people alternative pathways to accreditation? perhaps to explore entirely different ways of communicating/teaching scientific ideas? all are useful and relevant, though some might give you more of a niche than others. 

this is just my personal bias, but i would love to see us (p2pu) experiment with science learning at a pretty fundamental level, including the traditional ordering and stovepiping of material, and the delineation between science and not-science. IMHO p2pu has a leg up here since we're all experimenters already--whereas the accreditation realm is an area with a lot more competition and a lot more overhead and bootstrapping to become a player. but it does beg the question of whether creating a "school" of science reinforces those stovepipes? (i suppose this is as much a philosophical question about "schools" at p2pu as it is a comment on a school of science :)). 

anyway, just some initial thoughts. would love to hear more!

jessy

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Jessy

http://jessykate.com

[Philipp Schmidt]

On 28 October 2011 11:55, rob inglis <robert....@gmail.com> wrote:

Jessy (and others),

These are great questions! I'm excited by your interest, and of course happy to hear about the UMD connection. I think that we can teach dry, non-interactive ways of learning science to Fear the Turtle. Here are my attempts to answer a few of your questions. This isn't comprehensive, but hopefully can serve as a start. 

What would the SOS do that Khan and MIT OCW aren't already doing? 

The way I see it, there are three steps in mastering a concept in the basic sciences: listening, doing, and proving. First you have to listen to (or read) somebody's explanation of the concept. Then you have to apply and deepen your new knowledge by using it to solve problems. Finally, if you want recognition for what you've learned -- and I'm not saying everybody does -- then you have to prove your knowledge to some trusted authority (a professor, the American Chemistry Society's examination board, etc.).

My take on Khan is that he's doing an awesome job with the first of these three steps: providing clear, accessible explanations of the main concepts in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. But -- with the exception of his math practice problems, which seem to focus on elementary through early high school material -- he hasn't made a foray into the world of providing practice problems for people to test and develop their new knowledge. Which is what brings me to the next question I'll try to answer.

What would be a good place to start?

I think the best way to get started would be to create (or curate) a series of awesome open-source problem sets for intro chemistry or physics. (I'm leaning towards chemistry, because it's my favorite subject.) I'm hoping that the SOS will grow into something more than just problem sets, but I think it's important to provide a valuable service to some group of users as soon as possible in the development process. I think that self learners working their way through Khan lectures would like the opportunity to check their progress. And I am guessing that chemistry or physics teachers at the high school and college levels would find a lot of value in a set of well-crafted, self-grading problem sets they could assign to their students. There are some online problem sets that have already been published by MIT OCW (under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license), Centre College Chemistry Department, Harvard's Evans Lab, and physicsclassroom.com (run by a high school teacher in Illinois). But I think we could do something unique by centralizing these resources, making them interactive and self grading (MIT and the Evans Lab publish their problem sets as text only), and filling in the gaps in their coverage (for example, MIT's coverage of some general chemistry topics is weak).

The other immediate action I think we should be taking is to submit a content proposal in the DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition (this would actually need to be the first action, because the deadline is November 14). Which brings me to the final question I'll try to answer.

Where do you see this going? 

I think that we desperately need a better way for people to receive credit/recognition for science learning that takes place outside the classroom. For some people, the current model of sitting in a big lecture hall and then taking a few tests works well. Other people need more temporal and locational flexibility, or would benefit from frequent low-stakes assessments (or repeat-until-you-get-it-right "no stakes" assessments) as opposed to a few high-stakes tests. Other people would be perfectly happy with lectures-and-testing learning model, but don't have the money to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per class to take part in it.

For all these reasons, I'd like to see the P2PU SOS develop a badging system that recognizes people's progress in learning science through P2PU. I'm imagining badges that recognize:

1. The completion of problem sets

2. The successful completion of publicly announced, time-limited  "challenge" problems similar to the ones produced by the University Physics Challenge

3. Contributions made to other people's learning on the P2PU forums or -- if this is a feasible way to do this -- other places on the internet like Stack Exchange forums

4. In the specific case of chemistry, the successful completion of the American Chemical Society's nationally standardized end-of-course exams.

The goal would be to have universities and employers eventually start recognizing P2PU badges as the functional equivalents of credits from any other institution of higher learning. I think that one way to start down this path would be to get colleges to accept P2PU badges for placing out of introductory courses (i.e. you can skip general chemistry and go straight to orgo if you've got the right set of P2PU badges). They already do this with AP and IB test scores, after all.

These are just a few thoughts to get the ball rolling. I would love to hear what you guys think!

In a nutshell - I think this is great. 

It connects nicely to the work on "challenges" and badges (instead of courses) we are already doing - and offers a great opportunity to test and refine our model in a field other than web developer training.

Some comments to the first email:

* Happy for P2PU to help shape an application to DML. I think your original outline is a perfect fit. We are doing that with a few of the applications and it would be easiest if the phase 1 proposal was officially submitted by another organization, not P2PU. We would then respond to the phase 1 proposal together in phase 2. The process is a little convoluted. 

* Would the self-grading problem sets include elements of collaboration, peer-learning, and peer-assessment? I think that makes perfect sense - but it wasn't clear from your original description. In our "challenges" we try to bake collaboration into the way the tasks are structured, as well as include a peer-assessment requirement for some of the badges. 

I dig the "listening, doing, proving" model for science learning. 

Robert: would you be able to talk us through your idea, and have a discussion about it, during this week's community call? 

http://pad.p2pu.org/community

P

 

Rob

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Jessy Kate Schingler <je...@jessykate.com> wrote:

woohoo! COMPLETELY up for science classes :) (also, hello from another DC science person at UMD :)).  

my initial thought would be to pick one or two classes and focus on those first-- start small and iterate. think of p2pu as your science lab... for science classes. you can use it as a platform to experiment with initial offerings. it sounds like you have a particular knowledge about the chemistry part, so maybe that is a good place to start?

as for the school aspect, my initial reaction was "HELL yes!" though i feel compelled to play devil's advocate a tiny bit. it should certainly not be seen as a lack of enthusiasm for your contributions or ideas more broadly-- just exploring it.

how is this different from, say, what khan is offering? IIUC you're suggesting that the interactive peer component is missing from khan. can you leverage the content they already offer and then build social aspects around it? (perhaps this is already the plan?)

what would the goals of such a school/set of classes be? would it be expose people to science who aren't otherwise encouraged to learn science? would it be to give people alternative pathways to accreditation? perhaps to explore entirely different ways of communicating/teaching scientific ideas? all are useful and relevant, though some might give you more of a niche than others. 

this is just my personal bias, but i would love to see us (p2pu) experiment with science learning at a pretty fundamental level, including the traditional ordering and stovepiping of material, and the delineation between science and not-science. IMHO p2pu has a leg up here since we're all experimenters already--whereas the accreditation realm is an area with a lot more competition and a lot more overhead and bootstrapping to become a player. but it does beg the question of whether creating a "school" of science reinforces those stovepipes? (i suppose this is as much a philosophical question about "schools" at p2pu as it is a comment on a school of science :)). 

anyway, just some initial thoughts. would love to hear more!

jessy

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Alan Webb <alan...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Specific topics such as research, web development and course design are discussed in separate working groups:
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Jessy

http://jessykate.com

[rob inglis]

Great question about the role that collaboration and peer assessment would play in all of this. My thought is that the problem sets would be geared towards helping users develop and assess their individual knowledge. The "challenge" questions, on the other hand, would allow users to build on this foundation of individual knowledge by working together in teams to solve interesting and novel problems that require creativity. The problem sets would, for the most part, be asking questions with a single correct answer (3 g of CaCl2 dissolved in 2 L of water raises the boiling point by how many degrees?) so it would probably make sense to have them be self-grading so that learners could get instant feedback about how well they are understanding things. The challenge questions would be more open ended, with many potential "right" answers, so I think a peer assessment system would be the way to go for these. I can imagine that helping assess the challenge-question answers submitted by people in the level below you would actually be a good "give back" requirement for advancing through the badging levels. 

I'd love to discuss this during the next community call. And I appreciate your offer of help in shaping this into a DML proposal. I don't know if there's a separate institution that would want to sponsor a proposal like this for Stage 1 of the contest, but if P2PU was willing to sponsor it, I'd definitely want to make sure that it didn't overlap with or negatively impact any other P2PU Stage 1 proposals being submitted. 

[Philipp Schmidt]

On 28 October 2011 21:31, rob inglis <robert....@gmail.com> wrote:

Great question about the role that collaboration and peer assessment would play in all of this. My thought is that the problem sets would be geared towards helping users develop and assess their individual knowledge. The "challenge" questions, on the other hand, would allow users to build on this foundation of individual knowledge by working together in teams to solve interesting and novel problems that require creativity. The problem sets would, for the most part, be asking questions with a single correct answer (3 g of CaCl2 dissolved in 2 L of water raises the boiling point by how many degrees?) so it would probably make sense to have them be self-grading so that learners could get instant feedback about how well they are understanding things. The

I'd love to get other people's opinions on this. 

We have no experience working with self-grading questions that have one correct answer ... 

Who creates them? Are they dynamic or the same for everyone? Do we need to replenish the stock of questions, or does everyone work through the same set of questions? 

I find it easier to imagine a challenge that requires knowledge of how much the boiling point is raised by 3g of CaCl2 - with pointers to find out. In order to complete the challenge you need to know - but there would not be an explicit test. 

P