Community Rules and Principles for Collaborative Online Learning

“The History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education”Coursera MOOC, January 2014We are a community of participants from many countries, with different -backgrounds, -beliefs, -cultures, -genders, and -languages; We must be open and supportive of one another. Each person in the community should conduct himself or herself in a respectful manner and disagreements should be handled with a sense of camaraderie, mutual understanding, and respect without resorting to personal attacks or demeaning language.

To this end, this document establishes expectations for engagement in our online FutureEd community. Please feel free to edit, amend, or add to this draft.

#FutureEd: Massively Collaborative Online LearningFutureEd constitutes an experiment in collaborative learning. Together, we commit ourselves to identifying, evaluating, creating, iterating, rethinking, and building solutions to [mostly] higher educational challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for all of us in the 21st century. We believe that the Internet and technology should be a collaborative tool to transform how individuals and communities understand themselves and the world around them. Thus, this connected age offers a tremendous opportunity to make teaching, learning, and knowledge more accessible, more valuable, and more meaningful for everyone. This requires a rethinking of institutions of higher education and how we prepare younger students for matriculation to college or university. FutureEd aims to understand and learn from the limits imposed over the course of the history of higher education so that we might explore the possibilities and opportunities that exist for its future.

AspirationsWe have committed ourselves to:

Understanding and participating in experimental approaches to teaching and sharing for the benefit of learning for all.
Explaining objectives, goals, and methods in a clear and coherent way
Building a culture of openness, access, and respect in the pursuit of knowledge creation and dissemination.
Implementing a community-based approach to create:
Spaces for knowledge (re)production.
Pedagogy that reflects new ways of understanding learning and thinking in the Digital Age.
New modes and methods for knowledge creation that engage with digital media.
Definitions of, and opportunities for, advancing equality and access for all learners and educators without regard to their socioeconomic status, citizenship, gender, race, religion, or other cultural identifiers.
Collaborative and cooperative learning opportunities that broaden the classroom’s physical boundaries.
Collaborations that merge different preferences for learning, both old and new, that will bridge generational and cultural difference and create new learning methods.
Spaces where diverse voices have a better chance of being heard and incorporated into knowledge access, analysis, creation, and production.
Practice-based learning that is useful in individuals’ lives.
A dynamic setting that allows both theory and practice to continually evolve and improve.
An understanding of how different cultures approach (higher) learning, especially in shaping our digital age knowledge.
PrinciplesWe believe that:

Knowledge should be open and accessible to all people, whether in print or electronic format.
The purpose of education is to enrich lives; to prepare people to contribute intelligently, critically, compassionately, and empathetically within their communities and societies; and to help people achieve their individual, professional, civic and collective goals.
Designing opportunities for meaningful learning and increasing accessibility and usability of those learning opportunities are fundamental components of 21st Century education.
Individuals should be empowered to shape their own educational experiences.
All of us are smarter than any of us: different perspectives can enrich learning experiences.
Curation (the finding and sharing of learning materials) is a function of any and all willing members of the community, not the sole responsibility of the teacher.
Free and open source modes of learning promote the availability of knowledge as a public resource while open exchange of ideas gives knowledge value.
Transparent, community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.
Educators must develop methods of assessment that fit learning in the digital age by allowing space for lifelong learning; such assessments need to be done with tools known and practiced by the students.
We should work towards designing different methods of assessment to suit different kinds of learners.
A model classroom environment draws on every participant’s unique expertise for the greater good of collective goals.
There’s a difference between high standards and standardization, and it’s our goal to discover the digital possibilities to support the former and to transform the latter.
No decision within a collective needs to be unanimous, but every final decision regarding overarching goals and final learning outcomes should be supported by good reasons and a majority of rational perspectives.
Learners will be clearly notified of any use of student data in any way by Coursera so that they have the opportunity to opt out of the research or data use.
Support should be made available to learners who are motivated but may lack the technical skills to fully participate online.
Community ExpectationsWe expect that:

Participation will be informed by preparation, and limited in time
We will collaborate in a constructive manner as we assign, guide, and assess the work of peers.
Someone who promotes discord in our community by intentionally upsetting others through inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic expression will be considered a "troll."
There will be no tolerance for trolls in the FutureEd community.
Community members will neither practice, nor promote discrimination of any kind, or any other behaviors counterproductive to the fostering of a community together.
The community will be open to dissenting voices and seek to engage with dissenting opinions constructively. A dissenting opinion is not a personal attack. Reciprocal respect is required when responding to a post.
Community, "commune" is an active verb; being part of a community requires interacting with other members.
The community will seek consensus on any changes in the Constitution once it has been generally agreed upon.
This document may be used as a template for other documents. It is released with a Creative Commons License designed for non-profit sharing.