Philipp Schmidt

Bio

"(Jan) Philipp Schmidt is Director and co-founder of the Peer 2 Peer University, the original free and open online university and based in Cape Town. He is a board member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and holds a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship. He has implemented OpenCourseWare projects at the University of the Western Cape and the United Nations University MERIT. He is an open education activist and researcher and doesn’t like writing about himself in the third person. ... In June 2009, I received a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship to get the Peer 2 Peer University up and running. The fellowship is structured in an unusual and very clever way that encourages (social) entrepreneurship. Fellows are able to reinvest some of their grant money (which they could also pay themselves as salary) to get access to additional funds. This investment is then multiplied by the foundation if the project is approved. It’s a great way to bootstrap new projects and I wrote a blog post about it.

P2PU is taking up most of my time and I created a separate page (P2PU 360 Degrees) that gives more background and highlights some of my thinking around turning a “dangerous idea” into a paradigm shifting initiative.

Besides P2PU, I am involved in a number of things that broadly fall into the area of open collaborative resources. I have a position at the University of the Western Cape - where I do research and run projects in the area of open education; and work with the United Nations University MERIT where I am involved in research on Wikipedia as part of the Collaborative Creativity Group. I am also a board member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, occasionally collaborate with the Mozilla Education team, and co-organised the Open Everything Cape Town event." (http://bokaap.net/about/)