My name is Jennifer Peterson I'm really exsited that you're here today and joining  today's session.
We're going to go ahead get our recording started.
I'm going to introduce our guests for today.
I'm excited to welcome Grif Peterson he comes to us as learning lead from peer to peer university and Kate Lapinski the learning and economic advancement librarian at the Chicago public library, they're here to talk about their great work creating and facilitating learning circles in their library.
They brought an excellent model for all of you to use and replicate in your communities.
Welcome Grif and Kate.>> Thank you very much.
Very happy to be here.
I will just quickly introduce myself then Kate can do the same and we'll get started.
My name is Grif, no relation to our host Jennifer.
And I've been with peer to peer university based in Boston, Massachusetts, for about a year and a half now.
And about -- in guess 2014 we were recipient of knight foundation youth challenge award to develop a way for Chicago public libraries to start facilitating and running online courses, you may know them as massive open on line courses and other open education resources in their library branches.
After working together for a year, we released open source tool kit in February of 2016.
That we are now starting to work with a number of different libraries around the country and around the world.
And my hope today as I speak with you and listen to some of your questions, are just finding ways to get more and more libraries involved and  finding ways to facilitate online courses as part of the library programming.
Kate, do you want to introduce yourself?>> Sure.
Hi, everybody.
I am Kate Lapinsky I am from the Chicago public libraries adult learning and economic  advancement department.
So, we basically support 'dupt learning and economic advancement throughout the entire system and partnership with our neighborhood branches and other community organizations.
So, we oversee in nush tiffs relating to adult education, digital skills, workforce development and job search training, and career development.
So, since we concentrate on digital literacy as Grif said, we have been working with our fantastic partners at peer to peer university to pilot the program.
Which went on throughout 2015 and we've now rolled it out and working with some more librarians and we're running the sessions now in 2016.
.
>> I'm going to give a brief intro to the program and Kate is going to walk through the process of how it went in Chicago, go over some of the results that we've shared with librarians and patrons and then I'll come back at the end, towards the end and talk more just about the concrete steps that you can take and the different ways that you can get this started in your library, should you choose.
Then we really would like to reserve a lot of the time just for some questions and some conversation, though I recognize it's a bit one sided.
Just to be able to help assess out some of the questions that you're having or some of the goals that everyone who is part of this webinar right now would like to learn a bit more about.
We'll ask two or three questions up front to get a better sense of where everyone is coming from.
>> Excellent, thank you so 6, yes, only appropriate for webinar talking about online learning to implement some interactivity in today's online session.
If you have not yet used our annotation tools here in our WebJunction webinar, take a moment to go through the top left corner of your clue click on the marker that you see up there.
That will open annotation panel.
Go half way down the panel option and click on the box and then go down to the checkmark in the submenu.
And once you have your checkmark handy you can text on the screen, feel free to chair your check marks just as a test here on this screen, excellent, glad to see folks are finding them.
All right.
And then we'll have you pause after your practice and Grif will let you introduce their first option for checking.>> I love all of these check marks.
You can get your checks ready, first question we're going to ask here, just the experience that you have with online learning at your library.
So this is sort of a spectrumf this is the first time you've heard online learning you can thre your check somewhere down on the left-hand side above the bar.
If you're somewhere in the middle you know that people are coming to your library and using online learning but you're not doing much more beyond that, throw your check somewhere in the middle.
If you already have programming at your library like learning circles where people are coming on a weekly basis to work through a course, you can go put your check towards the right hand side.
This is looking a lot like what I think Kate and I have been talking about for the last year.
We know that people are coming to libraries to go through MOOKS and online courses, many libraries have accounts with Gale and Linda but we aren't seeing whole lot of people who are starting to facilitate programming around online courses in the way that they are around book groups an things like that.
I think one thing that CPL and P2PU --  somebody's very enthusiastic.
One thing that we have learned in the past year is that we treat online courses as just new form of knowledge and new way that information is being stored.
So while there's certainly a bit of a buzz around online courses and MOOCS we really think of this like ongoing program that is something that is just trying to help librarians work with patrons to gain knowledge and insight from a new form of communication.
And for the folks who have put their stars or their check marks towards the right, if you want to send a message in the chat either with a web link or short description of the work you're doing, I would love to learn a bit more about that.
I think the community here would benefit from that.
If you have any blog posts or anything about the work that you've done, please feel free to throw that in the chat.
There will be one more question for now.
That is, what programs would you like to see more of in your library.
And you can I think -- I'm not sure if people are only able to do one checkmark.
I think you can figure out way to do multiple checks, do that.
But these are few of the topics that we've been working at with Chicago public library using online dheersz we found from various places.
You can see that they are ranging from English language learning to resume writing, exam prep, some business courses and personal finance and digital marketing.
Digital lit ra tee spans a gal us from people who are really just orienting themselves to computers, to -- up to and through HTML we even ran a Python course and bit of catch-all or parenting, nutrition, happiness courses.
There are tons of others out there.
We just wanted to get a sense of as you're out there looking for programming whether it's with adults or with teens, get a sense of where people were coming with interests.
It seems like it's pretty well spread across with maybe a bit of concentration in the job uls skills and digital literacy which I think fairly similar to what we have seen in Chicago.
This is remarkably helpful for us.
It's amazing just to be able to speak with 60 librarians at once.
I should mention now just in case anyone has to leave early that we will be at the mesh libraries association conference in Orlando, we'll probably screen shot these slides include them in the talk.
If you happen to be down there, do come and see us.
At this point I think I'm going to just give quick more background on the project.
I think I've said most of this already, when we won the knight news challenge grant to deal with the issue of what low college completion rates we have in the U.S. and how many adult learners are out there, maybe are looking to complete college or just upscale get a new job and many college degrees, whether it's community, for profit, four year degrees, they're high in cost, lot of the thiem we're finding lack of relevance to individuals' lives not a lot of support, especially for the online programs.
As online learning is more and more of a thing, there has been a lot of buzz around the idea that maybe MOOCS will sort of solve the problem.
But I think for folks especially who don't have a great level of comfort on computers, we're finding that a lot of these programs, even free courses, really don't have the support that's necessary.
And so whn we started working with Chicago public library we were interested in finding way to use free on line courses and combine that with a local community and appear -- a peer learning network to cry to create a really  meaningful and still free learning experience for adult learners.
And that's where we developed the concept of learning circles, in a sentence describe these as lightly-facilitated study groups for learners who want to take online courses together in a public space.
And here you can see our little formula, we take an online course, I think this is the home page for Coursera, ranging from academic writing to aerospace engineering to web design.
And then we developed a few tools that we'll talk about today.
It's a handbook for facilitators, a workshop we run and free software tools that combine free text message reminders that go out to patrons.
And generate a free quick webpage so you can share a web link with your patrons and get people to sign up that way.
And we combine all these tools together, put them in a library and that's what these learning circles have become.
It really -- when we try this with Chicago we originally said, let's try this for six weeks, let's get people to come for 90 minutes or two hours a week and see how it goes.
And I think I'm going to turn it over to Kate now who can talk through a little bit of the experience.>> So, in front of you you have a little map of our beautiful city and orange dots are where the learning circles took place in 2015.
Just kind of a note on CPL as a system, our neighborhood branches and locations function pretty much independently.
So they plan and execute their own programming.
So in a case like this where we have the  learning circle in nushtive and we're really kind of working hard to be training our librarians to act as fa sill take ors and to have -- facilitate tors and have our branches host, we get volunteers to participate in the program.
So that's how we have everybody distributed throughout the city.
There's a lot of diversity in our branches, so, obviously they're in different neighborhoods so they have very different community needs a lot of them.
But there are also very different branch resources and staffing issues that we work with internally to make sure that everyone can host a successful learning circle and try to arrange everything that we can so that it goes well.
So, last year in 2015, we had 11 different branches participate, they did 18 different learning circles.
There were eight different courses offered and everyone stuck to the meeting for 90 minutes a week for six to eight weeks.
We're also -- we're in the midst of our spring session right now in 2016.
So, we had a staggered start, most of the branches who are hosting learning circles, the session started in the first or second week of April.
But we actually still depending on like I said, like all the different branches have different things going on so we actually still have branches that started just this week and are actually starting next week as well.
So this session we have 15 different learning circles and 14 different locations.
And we're covering about eight courses.
There are three career courses that we're doing.
There are a couple of branches hosting fiction writing, a couple are doing a finance course.
There are two doing public speaking, two that are doing a precollege English for speakers of other languages.
We have an academic English writing, we have two branches hosting a making the website learning circle then last one is a try college 101  learning circle.
That's what we have running currently.
And basically when it comes to course offerings which online class the branches are going to have, we narrow down the list of available courses.
Kind of administratively then we give it to the lie bririans who are going to act as facilitators for the next session and they choose from the list of what they will need and what they think their neighborhood needs.
So, we don't assign learning circles to specific locations, we obviously know that the librarians know the neighborhood and the community that they're working in best, so they get to choose what they're going to offer and what they're going to be facilitating.
Before the session starts, about two months before the session starts, we gather the librarians together at our central library in downtown and we go through a day of training.
We basically go through the facilitator tool kit that Grif mentioned and we just make sure that our librarians are comfortable with the model and knowing what they're going to have to do, kind of knowing what their job duties will frb week to week going through the learning circle.
We also make sure that people know how to sign up their learners and how they work with the different course providers, because that's another thing, there's diversity in which online course and which provider the learning circle is running.
It would be Kahn academy, just make sure everyone is familiar with the ones that they're actually -- that they're actually presenting.
Most of the learners who participated in 2015 heard about the program and heard about the learning circles through our website.
A few of them heard about the program from friends, other librarians or from flyers that were just posted in the library.
And one of the reasons that we have decided to run sessions instead of just letting all the branches kind of pick choose whn they want to start is that we're trying to get bigger outreach impact so if we can schedule and start them all together and someone does see a flier and they are interested and trying something new and coming to a learning circle, if they can't get to their nearest branch, maybe they can get to a branch that's close by or maybe they like a subject at a different one, we do try to run them and start them altogether.
We're also now at the point, in the stages of our summer and fall session and we're also  reaching out much deeper into our community partners so that we can get some more engagement with them and kind of geft a built in process that leads people to the learning circles.
And as we continue running them, we hope that people will -- that see them as a regular tool that the library offers.
So that they know they can sign up for the next session.
So, last year we had a really great inspiring group of learners that came and that were attracted to the learning circles.
So the majority of people had never heard of free online courses.
Some had heard of them but never taken one.
And others had taken an online course before.
So, we were really happy with these statistics at CPL because it meant that we were reaching the people that we really wanted to.
They were people who perhaps don't spend all day every day on a computer.
But they know that they have learning needs.
And they're willing to kind of learn and go through something and use it as a learning tool.
That's a pretty big leap.
I think that a lot of the learners that were coming to the learning circles, it was a big step so not only were they getting used to online courses in general but they were also getting used to this format.
They did kind of both things at once.
We also depending on the courses and like I said the neighborhoods are very different, but even within each individual learning circle there were really -- there was a big diversity with gender, age, ethnicity and background.
In the fall, in fall of 2015, I did a learning circle that was academic writing for speakers of other languages.
And that was a really, really successful, mixed group of patrons that we got in to participate in that.
And just kind of -- in my time as an adult librarian, I don't really have experience with other programming that got so many different types of people into one room.
And especially for that sustained six weeks, so that was really great and really inspiring for us to see.
So the reason that the learners came to the learning circle they had very different reasons.
45% were to increase employability.
And 25% was for personal interest and 15% was for professional development.
So far we have aimed and we're really trying to offer courses of the needs of the people that want to increase employability.
Or go back to school.
We really don't place too much focus at CPL on the personal development.
So we try not to offer courses like the science of happiness, or other things.
We try to stick to just like I ran through the courses that we're offering, career courses, writing courses, finance courses.
And then things like public speaking that could help in a job search, at school or just in somebody's life.
We're pretty tightly focused on employability and we're really happy to see that that percentage was such a big one.
We had really good retention throughout the learning circle.
And we were really, really happy.
So that first statistic there, 45-55% retention for over six weeks, it's amazing for us and for our adult librarians to get adult patrons to return to the library for six weeks in a row.
And to make that commitment.
Or for five out of the six weeks, whatever they come for.
We were really happy that the commitment for the most part really stuck and that people did keep returning.
And that they saw that this was something that would actually help them learn and to put them in that academic mindset.
And that it was easy for them in that time period to see that.
And Grif mentioned that -- he's going to mention it further on, we're happy with the completion rate for the courses.
35% of learners are going to plan to continue on their own.
80% did work outside of the learning circle.
So that kind of shows that the learners were motivated and were really in to learning, whatever the subject that was they were doing.
And 90% are interested in doing another learning circle.
At the library we were very happy with that as well, because this is such a new way to learn and it's in such a different format.
So a lot of our learners and a lot of our patrons are people who are very used to traditional schooling, right?
Might probably have never taken an online  course, then they come in and there is this learning circle but there's no teacher in the room.
Or taking HTML class there is no HTML expert.
But they learn how to lean on the format so they learn that they can count on their peers to help them through and to kind of assist their  learning process.
And also that there is the librarian in the room who is facilitating and acting -- making sure that everything goes smoothly.
And even if it comes down to it, making sure that they're connected to other resources that they can get the answers that they need.
Or if they want to explore other subjects more.
So that was a really, really great statistic for us to see that people liked it and that they took to the format that quickly.
Now, how it went kind of overall, the learning circle tore mat is really interesting because so much of it depends on the attendees and their personalities and how they gel as a group,  right?
For everybody that was coming in we had great diversity across the system with the way that groups formed, with the way that groups worked.
There were different course lay outs, there was a different amount of work that people did outside of the circle.
There were different sizes of circles, too, right?
We had some or even right now we have some that are running that have 14 learners in the  learning circle.
Then we have couple of other circles that are running this session that only have a few or even just a couple of people in them.
So there's really kind of great diversity in how things are going to go logistically.
But what is so great about the learning circle and the format and the structure that you rely on is that the model is so flexible.
You kind of facilitators will fit the tools that they need to run a very big learning circle to, run a smaller learning circle.
There are things that take them through -- facilitator tool kit also the recipe cards which I'll go in to in a little bit.
But that will kind of guide the facilitator through the six or eight week circle.
And make sure that all of the points are  being -- severing running smoothly.
There's also just the -- like the e-mail  reminders, the text message reminders that go out, so it's a fantastic structure to build on and I think that CPL has a lot of different librarians and a lot of different branches, but we're -- each librarian is able to structure the learning circle in a way that fits their branch and that fits their work day.
So it's been a great experience for us.
The next slide kind of goes through what the learners appreciated about the learning circles, about the goals that they set, how supported they felt by the peer, how learning -- that last statistics, too, about capacity for economic achievement was really great one.
We were really happy with that one.
But especially the first two statistics for setting clear goals and achieving goals that's a part of the package and a part of the facilitator tool kit that you get from P2PU is there are recipe cards, which are basically outlines and quick exercise incentives and activities that take the facilitators from week one all the way to the last week of the learning circle.
And they kind of go through and they hit different things that are important for academic mindsets and academic growth.
So right now I'm actually facilitating the try college 101 learning circle.
And we just had week two and the thing that we went over was setting clear goals.
Making sure that the learners knew what their goal was for the course.
Kind of saw how their goal would go through -- would go with the learning outcomes for each course so that's kind of what you're working on and spend a couple of minutes working on things like that and then the format allows all the learners to go into their course work.
So you really do keep things running and go through so that's really good thing to know that the recipe cards, that you get to pay attention to the different things that are going on from week to week.
So, the learners really like the learning circles and so far our experience has been fantastic because our librarians really love facilitating the learning circles.
They get to have personal engagement with their patrons, which is people that you know and people from the neighborhood who are spending time in the library, who you're familiar with.
You get to spend more time with them and kind of deepen your relationship.
It also, like I said, it gets adults in the door for programming so that there are people who are not in the library branch every week or even every month or maybe not ever.
It gets them in the door and it makes them see the library as a place that has these sustained learning opportunities with really modern tools.
Learning circles are a very innovative and -- if people aren't familiar and aren't regular patrons of CPL we're glad that we can expose them to that.
Also like I mentioned, it gets people to return for six weeks.
Before I was in the learning and economic advancement department I worked in one of our branch libraries, and if you would have told me that I could get any adult to sign up for something that they came back to see me six weeks in a row, I really wouldn't have believed you.
But with running these learning circles and  working with our librarians and working with Grif I see that it's actually possible that a lot of the people do return and do kind of keep that commitment.
It also -- lie brair yabs Rians really like it because it answers a community need.
We don't tell anyone what to do.
They choose their own course from the list of courses.
So they're able to think back and think what people are asking them and think about what people need.
So it's flexible based on each neighborhood and also it's a suggestion-week course if they're going to participate in another session they could kind of go through and pick something  else.
It's also exciting because it's really different than anything else that we do at CPL, it allows people to both learn and use new skills and we do the training, people are maybe a little nervous, they call me a lot, we kind of go through all of the tools.
But really soon as they get into the session they see that they have the right tools that they need and they learn the structure of the learning circles.
So it gives them just the right amount of flexibility to do the job well but to not also have to spend day in, day out working on this new job duty, it's something that they can learn and really take off running with.
The last thing that I wanted to mention about our librarians is that our librarians aren't tech Gurus, some have not taken an online class themselves before.
So it's a really great opportunity to, again, make sure that we're teaching our staff new skills.
And also to kind of give them the confidence that they are the person that's in charge of the learning circle and they're going to make sure that everything runs smoothly and that they can use this really new technology and this innovative format and really succeed with it.
So we've had good luck with that so far, with being able to have librarians different tech backgrounds successfully.
We just have a few pictures of our learners and some of the circles that took place last year.
This one is about how facilitators make the learner feel very comfortable.
All of these quotes are from learners.
I think that this one just speaks to how the learning circles are very easy entry into classes and kind of an academic mindset.
So it's a commitment.
You're saying you're going to come for a certain number of weeks.
And it's also an academic course.
You're learning something at a fairly high level but it's also in your neighborhood branch or in your neighborhood library.
Chances are good that you feel very comfortable, there's very little stuffiness or formality in our branches.
I think that people feel like it's a good easy on ramp to going back into this stuff.
Then also just the logistics like, our learners are not paying for anything, they're not getting graded, it's easy to go through.
This is just about how much the learners enjoyed meeting with the same groups of people every week and how it helped confidence levels, which especially in a class like public speaking that can be really great opportunity to form a tight knit group.
And speaking to the group mindset, this learner said, I like the accessibility of peers,  building confidence in a safe environment, no pressure with your peer group and learning from our peer group.
So this is one of the very interesting things that -- about the learning circles is that each circle really develops as a group over time.
So I just know from my experience facilitating that the first couple of meetings that you have, they are -- everyone in the circle looks at you as if you're the teacher.
They might look to you to answer questions and you have to be very careful to turn it back on to the peers and other people in the circle, but as it develops and as you go through and I would say usually around week three or week four, they are absolutely comfortable learning from each other, asking each other questions and knowing who to seek assistance, knowing when to offer assistance that's one of the things that's really great about it.
Because we've attracted pretty diverse groups within the learning circle so it's nice to see everyone kind of coming together and that's another thing that is reflected in the facilitator's recipe cards that I talked about.
I think it's in week three or week four the recipe card says, try to do less during your learning circle this week, let the learners do as much as they can on their own.
It's a good way that it comes together.
The best thing about my learning circle was knowing I was not the only one out of dream of writing and being share this to with my fellow learning circle.
This is attractive to us because it builds community.
Any time that you can build personal relationships within your neighborhood that goes to one of our very core mission statements is to build community and let people get to know each other in their neighborhoods.
This learner says, he appreciated our commitment to learning and expanding the tools of the library.
And that they felt lucky to have the opportunity to take the class.
The learners feel lucky and we feel very lucky at CPL to be able to offer these learning circles, because they're just -- they really -- we've seen them really fulfill a need in our communities.
And we really hope that we can kind of ramp up our offerings and invest more time and more thought in to how we can offer more learning circles that will help us.
So our plans moving forward with the learning circles are like I said, we're going to offer sessions in spring.
We're going to offer a smaller summer session, we don't expect to get that much branch participation in the summer.
The vast majority of our branches concentrate a lot on our children's summer learning challenge.
So it's just the branch is really busy place to be and just with the levels we don't ex sneact we'll get a lot in summer but we are going to offer some in our library which is our central library.
The but we'll really gear up for fall, too, we want to get major participation in the fall and make sure that we have plenty of courses to offer and plenty different neighborhoods and plenty different branches.
We'll offer the training again for librarians who want to facilitate.
And just couple notes about the training, welcome librarians to the training who are just curious about the model, who just want to know about learning circles because we hope that we're planting the seeds for the future.
So we hope that when maybe time comes that they don't have such staffing issues or that they can devote a little bit more time to it, that they can actually do it.
And that's worked well.
We have people coming to just check it out and it's also -- we feel that it's a great tool to have in the librarian's arsenal.
Not everyone has to offer a learning circle every session.
They can take breaks when branch schedules don't allow it.
They can do it as much as they want to, but once they know how to facilitate a learning circle and once they have been taught the tools that they need, it's a very easy lift.
The more they do it the more they know what to expect and can work their way very well through the circle.
We do hope to get to the point where our experience and skilled facilitators can totally choose their own courses.
We ran the program in 2015, we're running it  now, so we have a number of facilitators that ran a couple of sections last year, ran one session last year.
So soon we'd like to be able to just give them the balance and -- give them that ball but for right now since we're just kind of starting this making sure it's engrained into our adult  offerings, we do narrow down that list.
That has been our experience with learning circles at CPL, it's gone really, really well.
Our patrons have been happy with it.
Our librarians have been really happy with it.
In fact I was just on the phone yesterday with the librarian who is running one of the fiction writing circles this session in the spring.
She told me I promised it's no prompting for me at all show told me it was quickly becoming her favorite part of her work week.
Because she just got so much out of being able to help her patrons learn in such a different way than she usually does.
With that, I'm going to toss it, I think, back to Grif here.
>> Great, thanks so much for that, Kate.
I think it means a lot more when you say that than when I do.
I tried my best to answer comments and questions out there coming in in the chat.
I'm going to speak just for about probably five more minutes on just what sort of steps everyone on this webinar can take.
If it's something that you're interested in, I keep the questions coming in we'll try to save more than ten minutes just for questions towards the end.
Summarizing what Kate has said and what we at  P2PU are really excited about that we're seeing retention rates five or ten times higher than online courses on their own.
In addition to learning about the course materials also seeing increase in digital skills and academic mindsets through the rs pe cards that Kate mentioned as well as just the fact people on weekly basis are going online or fostering digital inclusion and expanded ak stoas a wide group of people who aren't otherwise taking online courses.
Supporting multiple learner pathways and different reasons for coming in to the course.
And we're really invigorating the library as a local community space for online learning.
And so those are the things that we're taking with us as we now start to work in to library branches and look for grant funding to really turn this from sort of prototype or version 1.0 into much more robust program.
So as we've mentioned a few times, there's this open source tool kit that is now available this is really the combination of this website,  learningsirk else.32PU.
It will automatically appear on this webpage you can send your own unique URL out to your patrons to get people to sign up.
And search the website, facilitator handbook, I think Jennifer just placed the link that this is free on our website.
Everything we do is openly licensed and this is about a 40-50 page handbook that walks through timeline that includes a course selection  rubric, template e-mails and flyers for your promotion.
It has all the recipe cards in it.
It sort of walks through from this call where you join this webinar sensibly because you are sort of interested in ways to support online learning in your library, and then as Michael says, Shazam, it takes you all the way down to getting learners in the door.
That is sort of first thing you can do, if this is interesting for you just check out our website, download the materials, create a  learning circle and see what is out there.
And as I said, I don't think I need to do anything more on this slide just explain this, but sort of extent of what we did, this handbook didn't exist until we had gone through two rounds of learning circles with Chicago, and so really is informed by librarians, by the  patrons, really trying to mirror and anticipate their needs as they were getting started with this program.
When you go into a website you'll see our facilitator guide that's the sort of step you take to create a learning circle.
You just fill out a few fields, what library you're meeting at, the date, the time and then your learning circle will show up on our  website.
You have flier that you can start publicizing with and as I think a few people asked in the chat, the handbook designed for this to be answered four-week out timeline.
So we think you getting the word out a month beforehand is pretty ideal.
You can share this and check people signing up.
We ask a few questions on the sign up, goals for taking the course, a few questions, if you have laptop or headphones, how comfortable you are with few basic digital tasks.
This is just information for you that is aggregated and shared with you so you just have better idea who have is coming in to your  learning circle.
Then just the sort of weekly tempo to have better idea of what our software does, when people sign up they start getting messages two days before each learning circle, either through e-mail or SMS reminding them to show up.
The group meets in person for two hours.
This is a bit too small to see but that is what each weekly recipe card looks like, it has introduction question, a group ak fifty, few prompts for you after each learning circle we ask that you take five minutes to do a little reflection and share back on this that sill take for dashboard that you'll have.
How the course went and that message is automatically sent out to learners the next week two days beforehand as part of their reminder.
We found this is just great way to sort of not really bog learners down with information and make them sign up for all these new things but just sort of nudge them along to get them to come back on weekly basis.
When they're done we spoke with patrons and we thought that some sort of informal certificate was useful so this is what we put together with Chicago public library, obviously the online course includes a validation or certificate, something that we support as well.
And that sort of the program.
I really encourage you to talk to patrons when they come in about online learning, it's a  very -- start thinking about MOOCS it's a new resource that other people are looking to the libraries to provide.
You can go ahead and explore 14 online courses there are out there as I've said in our handbook we have sort of guide for finding the right online course.
We have about 30 online courses listed on our website that we've culled through with Chicago public library, but there are literally thousands out there.
Not all in English.
If you have Spanish speaking community or any other comiewnlt I think you'll find once you start exploring this there really are extraordinary break of topics that are out  there.
There is no obligation if you download the handbook, it really can start giving you a clear picture of what this could look like in your branch.
Then as I said we'll be at AL ha, Kate and I will be speaking with representatives from a few other libraries and I would encourage you also to e-mail me if you are looking for sort of a larger collaboration.
Like what we did with the knight foundation in Chicago where we are there to sort of support courses, help select the courses, run facilitation workshops, develop new tools and new technologies, that's something that we have background in and expertise in and learning circles are quickly becoming the core of peer to peer universities work, because we like Kate said we see as really incredible way of sharing, engaging online learning experiences with a group of learners that generally don't benefit from them.
We think libraries are really the great -- really a great partner for that.
I'll just take -- I see one question right now from Jenny about whether libraries facilitate the same courses, absolutely not.
I think the workshop that we developed is really to help librarians find a course that supports their needs and their interests if you check out learningcircles.
P2PU.
org, librarians are facilitating a number of courses.
I put together one more slide just sort of takeaway one more an know fakes tool so if you want to go back and click on that square get your mark ready, I would love just to know of a tr tawrking about this we'll have about ten minutes for questions now.
But if you want to go ahead just mark what you're planning on doing with this next, if you're going to do absolutely nothing, that's good feedback, feel free to say that.
I would encourage you to do a little bit more than that.
You can tweet about it.
You can share the archive of this webinar with your colleagues, download the handbook, see how that goes.
Jump in to running a learning sirk em, as I said I am available if your library or work for larger system if they would be interesting in integrating learning circles into a component of your programming, we do consulting work around that.
We're always eager to provide for grants to try to start doing this or get existing projects and we'll be doing some work going forward, looking at U.S. public libraries ASCII way of getting learning circles out there.
I think that's it for me.
Jennifer, did you want to speak about some of the questions that you've been seeing?
>> Thank you so much.
It's so exciting to hear about this and I know people are excited now, there were some really great questions.
Just to clarify, Jenny's question was, does the same librarian facilitate that 6-8 week course?>> I see.
Each week is it the same librarian?
>> Correct.
>> Yes.
Generally that is the case.
There have been a few instances where two librarians will short of split the duty.
And if that is the way that it works best with timing, that has worked in the past.
We usually just recommend that both librarians or both facilitators be present during that first week if possible.
>> That's good.
A team teaching approach.
Kate, did you have anything to add to that?>> Yeah, I did.
I just wanted to say that there are ideal situations and then there are -- how things actually work within our system and probably I'm imagining this in other library systems.
And we do -- we have had a couple of times that like Grif said two people would do it or have been times that someone had another staff member like assist them to run the learning circle.
But most of the time we do try really hard to stick to that one librarian facilitator model.
>> Excellent.
I'm going to make sure we get this question out here.
Somebody said they're meeting with the CEO of  Corsera, what is the single best question a public librarian should ask him?>> As public librarian, do you want to try to answer that first?>> Oh, wow.
I feel like I'm really in the hot seat.
I think it would be great if you asked about online courses that were not quite at the college level.
I know at CPL just for our patrons and our population, it would be so wonderful to kind of get, instead of the college level online open courses, I would love it if it was like sort of late high school community college level, but for adults.
>> That's a great question.
Someone suggests that perhaps asking about making the interface easier to use for people with a lot of computer experience.
I think making sure they know about learning circles, that was the question that came to my mind earlier on, have you heard back from any of the folks that are providing MOOC access or other online learning, are they seeing the retention rate of learners as a result of  learning circles.>> I'll just say, the public speaking course that Kate Henk sd one course that we've run I think six times that is a Corsera course from the University of Washington I think you could mention that we've been running a few Corsera course, public speaking one in particular has been very successful.
But what somebody from the academy at a talk that I gave at south by southwest asked the same question, what can we do to help you.
And I said, you know, designing courses to be run as in-person experiences, recognizing that the best way for people to access Cors,r sarks not necessarily sitting at home on their computer doing it one on one.
But offering some tools or supporting a learning circle model, I think we'll allow Corsera to start reaching more and more of the learners that their mix statement says that they want to reach.>> Excellent.
There was a question about how -- do you limit the number of people in a learning circle, is there a number that is too many?>> We tend to take three is a crowd, sphowr a learning circle.
I think once you get to four, we have -- you sort of have enough people to bounce ideas around.
So on the lower end, we had one learning circle that had one person who came for I think 16 weeks in a row because they just liked getting the text message reminder and get away from their kids to come to the library once a week.
On the upper end I probably think 12 or so.
I'm curious what Kate things.
I think once you get more than a dozen people in the third or fourth week it could benefit to sort of break the group up if you sort of have some people that are doing a lot of homework, other people taking slower approach.
I probably say about dozen, what do you think?
>> Yeah, I think dozen is breaking point.
Each circle is unique, if there was something going on that these dozen people were all  working at the same pace and were all doing the exact same amount of work outside of the circle, maybe it could work with more than a dozen.
But I don't think that more than a dozen would be ideal.
>> Excellent.
There was a question about do learners learn at their own pace or working at the same pace as everyone?
I would say that maybe being able to break out into those smaller kind of sub-learning circles could address the needs of different learning styles or paces.>> Yeah, that's right.
Each circle also kind of decides early on how they want to work together.
If everyone sits around and has the conversation of, I don't expect to do any work outside of this 90 minutes that we're meeting here in the library, then they wouldn't do that.
That is something that each circle could decide on and could go through.>> Excellent.
Grif, did you have something?
>> I agree with that.
Some of the courses like the test prep web design are more designed as one on one experiences between the learner and the course platform.
I think those lend themself to people taking their own path.
Public speaking is a very personal experience so with those I think that's where you tend to get a group of people who are in it together.
Like Kate said, we remain flexible.
Those are exactly the sorts of questions that come up in the recipe cards in the early weeks, how much work are we going to do outside of this learning circle.
What if some people don't have computers.
How do we accommodate the needs of multiple people who are coming from different backgrounds into this shared space.>> I'm wondering if you're going to answer the question, do library users get confused as to where the learning circle is located and is there a way to filter by location?>> We have specific pages, that's a screen shot just our home page.
But if you were to go to learningcircles.P2PU.
edu you can see there are learning circles happening I think from the screen shot in Mexico City, in Paris, in Dubai and so we sort of -- the handbook I think helps articulate a promotional plan for each library.
Sometimes you want people to sign up but sometimes the flyers in the library branches are best way to get people in the door.
We try to make it pretty clear.
If there's one confusion to clear up at the beginning, it's the sort of dynamic of what is the difference between a learning circle and the online course.
The question about what resources we've used is relevant here.
We find courses with CPL from Kahn academy and  Cosera and others, MI ti open course, Udastity.
And these are all free online course providers.
Linda is one that we haven't used yet.
Leash free is one that I've been speaking with somebody about we're probably going to start using.
Learning circles can really be wrapped around any online resource, important thing up front just explaining that the learning circle is really just a model to help people get through the online course, which comes from one of these various providers.>> Excellent.
I think that's an excellent segue, just remind folks that all of our WebJunction webinars are archived we know many library staff are learning together around our archives.
We do often provide a learner guide for folks to learn together and encourage people to adapt those guides, this learning circle model certainly would be a great one to experiment for learning internally with your staff as well.
I think we are at the top of the hour we need to wrap up, but as Grif said please don't hesitate to contact him with additional questions and we will look forward to sharing e-mail with you when the archive is available.
We also will send you to a short evaluation as you leave this session today.
I know there was question about how do you evaluate online learning, which is a huge question.
But hopefully you can take moment to provide feedback to our presenters and to us as we develop our ongoing programming and thank you again to both to Grif and Kate as well as our captioner for today.
Thank you all so much for being here and we look forward to seeing you nks time.
Thank you.>> Thank you so much everyone.