At first glance, OAPS101 looked like a course built around freedom.
It was free, open, self-paced and non-linear. All five modules were available from the first day. Participants were invited to follow their interests.
But while Australia slept, people in Cardiff were monitoring the course.
When OAPS101 went live in November 2012, Keith Lyons described it as a personal learning journey. He also told participants that he would monitor discussions, answer requests for clarification and remain an email away. Surviving Cardiff OAPS101 materials show that Darrell Cobner, Adam Cullinane and Huw Wiltshire were also contributing substantive learning resources and activities on seeing and observing, systematic observation and permanent records of performance. Darrell and Cardiff colleagues would watch the course during the Australian night so that the learning environment could have a near-continuous human presence.
Keith called the course invitational, voluntary and supportive. He also called it fallible and said it was being constructed by everyone involved.
That combination matters.
The course was designed to leave room for participants to make their own routes. Yet those routes sat inside an environment that other people were hosting, monitoring, writing for, responding in and keeping available.
Across Clyde Street, that pattern keeps returning in different forms.
Personal learning is personal.
It is not necessarily solitary.
And in these sources, it is not maintenance-free.
Open does not mean unattended
The 2012 course makes the hidden labour unusually visible.
OAPS101 was not organised around one teacher delivering one sequence to one class. Multiple authors contributed material. The surviving Cardiff materials make some of that work visible: resources on seeing and observing, systematic observation and permanent records of performance mixed explanation with questions, video prompts, exercises and invitations to contribute back through the open-learning site. Keith remained available to participants. Cardiff colleagues covered the Australian night. The OpenLearning platform itself was part of what made the experiment possible.
None of that means the course produced the learning Keith hoped for. A live course, an open resource and an active facilitator are not evidence that every participant learned, contributed or felt equally able to participate. The surviving Cardiff files demonstrate that learning materials and activities were contributed; they do not tell us who used them or what learning followed.
Keith was explicit about the uncertainty. The offering was fallible. Its non-linear character could be messy. Participation was voluntary.
But the source does establish something simpler: learner freedom and human support were present at the same time.
The personal route did not require the disappearance of other people. It could sit alongside support.
That support was not one thing.
Sometimes the work was answering a question. Sometimes it was monitoring a discussion. Sometimes it was adding a resource, creating an invitation, sharing an example or simply being there when somebody arrived.
The environment learns back
By March 2015, another open course had made the relationship more complicated.
In #UCSIA15 Connections, Keith began with an email from a friend. The friend said that the most useful part of the community was the opportunity to share and learn from others, while also regretting that more people had not joined the discussions.
Darrell Cobner’s reflections on the course were also making Keith think. So were earlier conversations with educational designers at the University of Canberra.
Before the course, those designers had encouraged Keith to scaffold learning and sharing more actively. Keith wrote that he had resisted their suggestions. Three weeks into the live course, he described part of his own learning as working out how to negotiate the continuum between prescription and openness.
That is a revealing reversal.
Keith is not standing outside the learning environment, arranging learning for everyone else. Colleagues, participants and visible patterns of engagement are changing what he notices about his own design.
The evidence is modest. One friend’s email is not a course evaluation. Darrell’s reflection is Darrell’s reflection. A visible contribution does not tell us what silent participants learned.
But the source does show Keith revisiting his own design choices. Supporting personal learning was not simply a matter of building an open space and withdrawing. He was now thinking more carefully about invitation, scaffolding and the balance between prescription and openness.
And those choices were being shaped with other people.
Connectors are part of the learning environment
A few months later, Clyde Street moved from open-course design into coach learning.
In #coachlearninginsport, Keith described a meeting with two highly experienced coach educators who had enabled him to work with twenty-one high-performance coaches over a three-year project.
What impressed him was not only what the educators knew. It was what they connected.
He called them connectors and mavens. They knew people and places, and they shared what they knew.
Keith was thinking about personal learning environments, social learning, microlearning, non-linear pathways, reflection, curation and findability. But he also wrote that he wanted to support the coach educators’ learning journeys.
The direction of support had begun to multiply.
The project was organised around coaches’ personal learning journeys. Keith was reflecting on what the project was making him notice. The coach educators were not merely delivery mechanisms for somebody else’s development; Keith wanted to support their learning journeys too. Resources needed to be findable. People needed to be connected. Conversations needed somewhere to continue.
This is where “Learning With” becomes more useful than a list of helper roles.
The point is not that every professional learner needs a person called a connector, a facilitator or a curator. Clyde Street does not give us a taxonomy.
The point is that personal learning is repeatedly accompanied by work that sits around the learner’s visible choices: finding, introducing, filtering, sharing, noticing, inviting and keeping contact alive.
That work can disappear from the story if attention stays only on the person doing the learning.
Self-organising still has people in it
In March 2017, Keith joined an online group of coaches.
At first, he mostly listened.
In #coachlearninginsport: self-organising networks, he described himself as a peripheral participant. Then a coach asked the group for ideas about continuing professional development organised “by coaches, for coaches”: more interactive, discussion-based and networked than a conventional programme.
Keith responded by bringing in ideas from the Connectivism and Learning course he was taking with Stephen Downes. He wondered whether CPD might become CPL — continuing professional learning — with people navigating, selecting, creating and sharing from their own contexts.
The source is useful because it does not show a network in which everybody performs the same role.
One person initiates. Others respond. Some listen. Keith himself moves from peripheral participation into conversation.
That is not evidence that everybody learned. Nor is peripheral participation a hidden outcome we can simply assume.
It does show that “learning with” can contain different intensities of presence.
Two months later, Forums and Agency made the maintenance problem harder to overlook.
Keith returned to Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith’s work on technology stewardship. Their account gave stewards practical responsibilities: understanding a community’s needs, selecting and configuring technology and supporting its use.
Keith’s own emphasis was leadership.
He wrote that stewarding and driving a community was too important to be left to chance. He also recorded a problem: organisations were struggling to find enough volunteers willing to do the work.
This changes the romance of the self-organising network.
A community can be open and distributed and still depend on somebody configuring the platform, welcoming people, modelling participation, answering questions and sustaining momentum.
The work may be shared.
It may also become concentrated.
Keith described commitment to a community’s flourishing as potentially intense and something that needed to be shared. That is not proof that stewardship is always good. A steward can carry authority as well as labour. The design of a space can enable participation and still shape what participation becomes.
But it gives the article its hardest practical point.
Self-organising does not mean nobody has to keep the place going.
Time, trust and pizza
By 2019, the same problem appeared in a different professional setting.
A colleague had raised a question about how data analysts should be developed and mentored. In A Lens of a Critical Friend, Keith looked toward the #RLadies community, critical-friend literature and his own experience of informal “unmeetings”.
The setting was deliberately ordinary: repeated conversations, pizza, good coffee, time together.
The intellectual point was more demanding.
Drawing on Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, Keith was interested in trusted relationships that could ask provocative questions, offer another lens and remain advocates for the success of the work. He also brought in Michael Garet and colleagues’ research on professional development to argue for sustained, high-quality learning opportunities and the investment needed to make them possible.
The external evidence has to stay in its own context. Research about teacher professional development does not demonstrate analyst learning. #RLadies’ scale or inclusiveness does not prove what any particular analyst learned there.
Keith’s own proposition is narrower.
Long-term support for learning matters.
And in his account, sustaining it calls for investment.
Time. Trust. Places to meet. People willing to ask questions and listen to answers. Leaders willing to invest in learning opportunities that may not look like conventional courses.
By this point, the social work around professional learning is difficult to treat as incidental.
What “with” can mean
Clyde Street does not turn these sources into one theory of relational learning.
The settings are too different for that.
An open online course is not a coach-learning project. A self-organising forum is not a critical-friend relationship. #RLadies is not evidence about performance analysts merely because Keith finds it suggestive. A colleague who keeps a course alive overnight is doing different work from a coach educator who connects people and resources, or a steward who configures a community platform.
Nor do relationships guarantee good learning.
Networks can overwhelm. Facilitation can become control. Stewardship can concentrate authority and exhaust a few volunteers. Invitations can go unanswered. People can remain peripheral. Available help can remain unused.
What the sources make visible is less grand and more useful.
Again and again, personal professional learning is surrounded by other people doing work that can otherwise vanish from view.
They host.
They monitor.
They respond.
They connect.
They curate.
They scaffold.
They steward.
They question.
They make time.
Sometimes the learner chooses the route while somebody else keeps the road open.
Sometimes the person supporting the learning is learning too.
Sometimes a community depends on labour that nobody notices until there are not enough people willing to do it.
That is the tension inside Learning With.
The learner’s journey can remain personal without being self-sufficient.
The question is not simply whether people are connected.
It is what work those connections require — who does it, how visible it is, how it is shared, and what happens when too few people are willing or able to keep it going.
Question to carry
What work is making this learning possible around the learner — who is doing it, how visible is it, and what happens if nobody can keep doing it?
Keith Lyons, “#OAPS101 Goes Live 5 November: Starting Out” — 12/11/05
Supporting OAPS101 artefacts — Cardiff contributions
Darrell Cobner, Adam Cullinane and Huw Wiltshire, “Permanent Records Of Performance SOOC”
Darrell Cobner, Adam Cullinane and Huw Wiltshire, “Seeing and Observing SOOC v1”
“Seeing and Observing Exercise SOOC v1” — accompanying participant exercise
Darrell Cobner, Adam Cullinane and Huw Wiltshire, “Systematic Observation SOOC”
Keith Lyons, “#UCSIA15 Connections” — 15/03/15
Keith Lyons, “#coachlearninginsport” — 15/07/02
Keith Lyons, “#coachlearninginsport: self-organising networks” — 17/03/15
Keith Lyons, “Forums and Agency” — 17/05/04
Keith Lyons, “A Lens of a Critical Friend” — 19/09/12
Source and ownership note
“Learning With” and “the relational work behind professional learning” are editorial descriptions of a recurring source problem, not Keith Lyons’ terminology and not a formal Clyde Street model. Four surviving Cardiff OAPS101 PowerPoint artefacts now sit alongside the Clyde Street launch source as supporting primary course material. Three title decks explicitly credit Darrell Cobner, Adam Cullinane and Huw Wiltshire; an accompanying Seeing and Observing exercise survives with the same Cardiff contribution set. These artefacts establish contribution to course content and activity design, not participant use or learning outcomes. Stephen Downes retains ownership of the connectivist formulations Keith follows. Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith retain ownership of technology-stewardship concepts. Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick retain their critical-friend formulation. Michael Garet and colleagues retain their professional-development evidence. #RLadies, the course collaborators, coach educators, coaches and other named or unnamed participants retain their contributions and contexts. Keith owns his course designs, reflections, local syntheses, propositions and the changes in emphasis visible across Clyde Street.
This article does not claim that network participation demonstrates learning, that facilitation produces outcomes, that open access creates equal participation, that stewardship is automatically benign, that all professional learning requires the same relational arrangement, or that teacher professional-development findings establish analyst-learning effects.
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Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Oaps101 Goes Live 5 November Starting Out” — 12/11/05
Keith Lyons, “Ucsia15 Connections” — 15/03/15
Keith Lyons, “Coachlearninginsport” — 15/07/02
Keith Lyons, “Coachlearninginsport Self Organising Networks” — 17/03/15
Keith Lyons, “Forums And Agency” — 17/05/04
Keith Lyons, “A Lens Of A Critical Friend” — 19/09/12