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Introduction
While recent platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera and edX have garnered substantial public attention, MOOCs were originally conceived of as participatory environments where groups of learners (from small to massive) collaborate to aggregate self-created learning experiences (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010). In this model of peer-based, open learning, a course might organize topics and guide the schedule. However, individual learners coordinate the learning activities by contributing blog posts, links to resources, and other media. This model brings to the foreground a bottom-up, crowd-generated approach to delivering online education versus the top-down approach implemented in popular platforms. Yet in spite of their differences, learner participation and engagement is a concern in both types of MOOCs (Waters, 2012).
At a basic level, any learning platform requires participant engagement to achieve its goals. Individuals must participate in the provided activities in order to have the learning experiences that are the focus of the platform. Beyond this basic form of participation, crowd-generated learning platforms require learners to engage in many other activities such as creating courses and learning materials, joining online courses, contributing comments and discussion, and persisting in the group's learning activities. Creating a participatory MOOC environment requires both more coordinated work (Butler & Ahn, 2013) and more types of participation than top-down MOOCs that rely primarily on individual learner engagement (Ahn, Weng, & Butler, 2013; Kafai & Peppler, 2011). However, in spite of its importance, there has been little empirical work done on conceptualizing and measuring participation in large scale, open learning platforms.
In the following study, the patterns of participation and engagement present in a prominent participatory, open online learning community, the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), are examined. An outline is first provided of how P2PU is an example of a peer-generated open online course platform that speaks to the original notion of participatory MOOCs. Then, statistics derived from a comprehensive dataset about P2PU courses and participant activity are presented, with the aim of exploring the question of how learners have participated and engaged with open online courses in P2PU.
The data in this study describe the course ecology that exists on the P2PU platform using metrics such as the number of member-created courses, types of courses,...