Hi everyone.

In the last video, we went over the Ostrom core design principles. In this video, I’m going to go into a bit more detail about how the course is structured, using the design principles as a guide. This is going to be another list video, because list videos are easy to keep track of.

Lets get right to it

Design principle 1: Group identity and purpose.

The identity of this group is well defined: Its all of the students enrolled in the EvoS Seminar Series at Binghamton University, plus Mel and I, who are teaching the course. Our purpose is also well defined. We have a group level goal of reaching 10,000 subscribers by the end of the semester. That goal can be accomplished by each of you pursuing your individual goals – to learn evolutionary theory, and to make good videos.

Design principle 2: Fair distribution of costs and benefits.

Being a member of this group requires work, and it will also yield rewards. But the work we do, and the rewards we receive, will be different. Each of you has paid tuition to be a member of this group, whereas I am being paid. Ostensibly, the money you’ve paid will go towards course credit, and eventually a degree, while the money that I receive is for the work I do as a teacher.

The work we all do in the class will be somewhat similar. Just like you, I will be making a video about each of our 10 guest lectures. I am responsible for giving you thoughtful feedback on your videos, and I expect you to give thoughtful feedback to each other, and to me. We will all read the same papers every week. However, while the homework assignments we all do will be the same, we should evaluate them in a way that acknowledges our different abilities, and our different schedule requirements.

This is my full time job, and I will be doing nothing but this course for the next 5 weeks. I expect to devote about 80 or 90 hours of work a week to this class. I imagine that many of you have other jobs besides this class, and might also be taking additional classes this semester, and so the time that you devote to the course will be limited. That’s fine. We should only expect each other to give to this course as much as our time and abilities will allow.

Design principle 3: Collective decision making.

This course is being taught out of Binghamton university, a decidedly hierarchical institution. Binghamton has given me the role of an instructor, which means that I have more decision making authority than you do. Many of the key decisions about the class have already been made, and the course is structured around Binghamton university requirements. However, wherever possible, I want to try to make decisions about this class collectively, as a group. This wont be so relevant in the beginning, when your assignments will be fairly simple and proscribed. But as the course progresses, and especially when we start publicizing our work, I look forward to making decisions as a group.

Design principle 4: Monitoring

If we are going to work well together, we need to be able to keep track of what we each are doing. We are going to use some social media tools to keep track of this. Like, I want to make sure that you are watching this video. So right now, what I want you to do is pause the video, and go down to the comments section and write a comment that contains the word “purple.” Seriously, do this right now, Ill wait.

Did you write a purple sentence in the comments? OK good.

We’re going to use various social media metrics – views, likes, comments, shares, that kind of stuff, to keep track of just how well we’re doing over the course of the semester. I’ll post another video in the future about the details of how we’re going to monitor each others work, but for now, writing a purple sentence in the comments is great.

Design principle 5: Graduated Sanctions

The main form of graduated sanctions this course will use is grades. Like I’ve said before, grades do not indicate how much you know, or your worth as a human being – they are constraints to keep your work focused in the right direction. If I notice that your work is not contributing to our stated course goals as effectively as I believe it could, I will give you a poor grade, and indicate the areas where you could improve.

Grades are an excellent graduated sanction that I can use, as an instructor, to motivate a change in your behavior. But what if you, as a student, want to change my behavior? This brings us to the next design principle.

Design principle 6: Conflict resolution.

We should be able to take advantage of the hierarchical system that Binghamton university creates to manage most conflicts. If you have a problem with some way that I am behaving, and you don’t feel like you can discuss it with me directly, you can contact my advisor, David Wilson. If you don’t want to bring the issue to him, you can also contact the university ombudsman, whose fulltime job is to solve university conflicts. Ive put both of their contact information in the description.

But, my hope is that we wont have to appeal to hierarchies to solve our conflicts. At its core, the curriculum of this class is about communication. That doesn’t just mean communication to the public, through youtube, it also means communication with each other. I think it’s really important that we cultivate a classroom environment where we feel like we can speak to each other openly, and directly. So if you have a conflict with me, or one of your classmates, our first step should be to reach out, and have a conversation about it. Most issues can be resolved in this way.

Design principle 7: Local autonomy.

This class has a fair amount of local autonomy, in that what we do wont be directly constrained by anyone from the university. But still, this is a university class, and my authority as a teacher comes from that institution. There are certain things I can’t do, like abolish grades, because this class is not completely autonomous.

Design principle 8: Polycentric governance.

If we do our job right, we will be entering into a global youtube community. That community has norms and values just like any community. What we do and what we say doesn’t just have bearing on us, and our personal academic lives – it relates to all the millions of people who use online video.

So those are the 8 design principles, as they relate to our class. Even though we are all in different parts of the world, I want to emphasize that we’re not just isolated students. We’re a group. Lets be a good one.