Peeragogy is a promising fruit of the co-world

The " world of co " is unfolding little by little. There is not a day when pooling, sharing (e.g. carpooling), collective, cooperation, collaborative or even coopetition [1], does not find new paths and new grounds for expression.

Software that brings together couples, supply and demand of goods and services, distant actors, ideas, or else projects, further accelerates collaborative prospects. The world of "co " is also progressing in terms of professional training. In this regard, it is possible to point to four examples:

1. Co-design (or co-design) ;
2. Learning communities ;
3. Professional co-development ;
4. Collectives (collaborative software).
    

Co-design or co-design

is an approach that aims to design in a concerted and collaborative way new organizational solutions, innovative products, public policies in line with needs. The 27th region[2] is a stakeholder interested in public policy transformation and uses design approaches extensively; it defines it as :

" design is a creative design approach to products or services, focused on the user.

It is a method, but also, a way of thinking and understanding projects. Beyond designers, design concerns all designers, creators who apply a logic of innovation that is iterative, transformative, user-centered, with a high requirement of understanding and aesthetics of productions ".

The addition of the prefix " co " reinforces the idea of a collaborative design process during which each actor is placed on a par with the others. Design then becomes a tool for transforming reality, public communities and their agents.

Learning communities

refer to collective realities that express different ways of learning collectively : from society as a whole, to the school educational community, to the small group of peers that organizes itself in the professional sphere.

The learning communities that are currently emerging respond to the need to come together, share and exchange physically and online. These communities are being created around shared interests, needs, topics, and domains. The progressive construction of these communities is less concerned with the administrative forms that regulate them than with the need to learn together.

In doing so they invent by living it a peeragogy, where the legitimacy of the one who teaches holds more to the relevance of a knowledge situated in a problematic, than to the mere expression of a general rule. Peeragogy is thus a practice that values know-how and builds practical legitimacies.

Professional co-development

is, alongside practice exchange groups or learning circles, one form of community where one learns from peers who have experienced real cases.

"Professional co-development is a developmental approach for people  who believe they can learn from each other to improve their practice"[3].

Around a question brought by one participant the others act as consultants. A facilitator sets the necessary framework of trust and guides the interactions, leaving plenty of room for the participants. The peeragogy that is put in place here gives everyone the feeling of belonging to a group of individuals equal in dignity and situation. It moves away from the " I teach therefore you learn " syndrome specific to traditional power relations linked to the training universe.

Groupware

are software that promote group and remote work. They cater to multiple functions of co-writing, brainstorming, file sharing, mindmapping and template generator, group discussion, curation, audio or photo capture, editing, resource production, localization, quiz creation, synchronous or asynchronous communication. There is a huge body of it that is constantly evolving to match the needs of collaborating.

Peeragogy !

One of the commonalities that can be noted in these four examples lies in the sharing. It leads to the progressive formalization of the concept of "peeragogy "

This term has already been translated in a cursus.edu[4] file as " educational know-how applied to peer learning " is needed at a time when the complexity is such that a single teacher or trainer is hard pressed to process an exponential mass of information alone and to apprehend alone the conclusions to be drawn for the future.

Numerous actors, trainers, trainees, and professionals are thus affected by these new approaches in which the peer is less a work or study neighbor and more an active partner in learning and building life together. Universities are getting involved and thinking about the issue of peer-to-peer learning[5], companies are looking to become collaborative and want to capture the benefits, training organizations are integrating these practices into their offerings.

There is still a need to formalize good practices and identify what works and what are the limitations of peer-to-peer learning.

 Illustration: Dean Drobot - ShutterStock

References