PETRI is a learning ecosystem and a testbed to attract diverse expertise and enable talent more effectively to contribute to the grand challenges we face — a petri dish in which to study how best to motivate and incentivize dynamic social networks to address global challenges.

Overarching Objective. We aim to create a dynamic, evolving learning environment where professors and researchers find new, higher impact ways to apply their research in the world such that their network can learn from and translate their models for other applications. In such a learning ecosystem students question prior assumptions and engage in active learning by applying their knowledge in the world.

Mission. Many of the global challenges we face have implications so complex that they are not amenable to definitive analyses, e.g.

• loss of sea life due to massive plastic dumping in the oceans,
• life stressors and massive migration and adaptation demands due to climate change,
• agricultural collapse due to loss of biodiversity and compromised ecosystems,
• impacts on public health of the universal penetration into the food web and water supplies of plastic pollution.

PETRI starts from stories – the stories of project leaders and their impact. Conducting experiments that we can analyze and tracking actions in PETRI of users who read, tag, and respond to stories creates an evolving, self-improving hybrid human–AI learning system. Human learners and the AI system are part of a feedback loop for learning and enabling each other’s learning. Human pattern recognition capacities work in tandem with AI capacities in an integrated system.

PETRI is developing templates to grow resource materials to support a new learning paradigm.

For professors, each project is

• a hub around which stories about different facets of that project are collected;
• a sandbox for experimentation and through which the progress of each project can be tracked;
• an educational framework to tap student talent and provide student fieldwork experience to record project updates, which can be posted in the earthDECKS ecosystem;
• a testbed where new R&D models and breakthroughs are shared with the world.

For students, PETRI is a means to develop

• motivation – students navigate their own paths through the knowledge base and identify also “what’s missing.” What new stories need to be told? What stories do we students care about? Or not? And why?
• critical thinking – students look for conflicting information, bias, errors, etc
• writing as thinking – students write critique of stories and write their own stories;
• stories that inspire action – reading a story leads to resources for how to start projects, or support existing projects, then report back with new stories about the progress of their fieldwork;
• impact tracking – learning various means of impact tracking and how to apply them;
• collaboration – how to support and enable others to maximize their impact.

The Platform will

• engage early adopter professors / teachers to work with us to define functionality needed for a dynamic, evolving knowledge platform that
• encourages students to learn about and contribute stories about field work they engage in
• transforms a small demonstration into a collaborative intelligence (C•IQ) engagement platform that enables diverse, distributed teams (starting with students) to share information and collaborate to solve some of the challenging problems that face our planet.

Beyond MOOCs – A Next Generation Social Network

PETRI (Planet Earth Teaching and Research Initiative) allows us to explore how future MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) can be coupled with “citizen science” and project-based learning in action. In PETRI every Story Contributor is a “Reporter” in an environmental news agency network. Every story reader is a “News Analyst,” learning critical thinking skills by writing comments about the story. Players earn earthDECKS tokens (eDT) by reading and writing stories, which receive critique and ratings from other students and teachers (determining token awards). The best stories are posted and become part of PETRI’s growing story collection. Backend analytics show which topics attract most interest and stimulate project-based learning.

Users become eco-warriors based on their level of contribution to the grand challenges of saving this planet.

earthDECKS, inspired by Wikipedia, is developing new generation of MOOCs with

• meta-tagging to network and cluster tags to similar and complementary tags (crowd-sourcing human pattern recognition and assessment skills);
• a rating, assessment, and filtering system, so that more useful lessons rise to the top;
• time-stamping, so that expiry and critical path dates and timeliness can be noted;
• authoring, such that Contributors are credited with a back-end system to track who contributed what;
• a system of search using not only key words but also parameter ranges; expertise and location of responders; date of incident and follow-up, clustering key words and other search criteria to filter results, not only by topic but according to other criteria;
• geo-tagging, so that where incidents occurred, and which responder networks were activated, is known to the system;
• incentives to motivate responders to report incidents, meta-tag and rate results, both their own contributions and those of others, particularly those that most relate to their own;
• capacity for Embedded Continual Assessment (ECA) to trace and report updates;
• next generation social networks, transformed into problem-solving networks, with potential to scale and translate across varied requirements.

PETRI goes beyond the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), offering a unique way for students to navigate their own learning paths to discover ways to apply their learning to make a contribution and to make meaning in their own lives.

Key non-profit collaborators:

1. THE OCEAN FOUNDATION – developing our prototype at  https://earthDECKS.org and engaging the global network of ocean organizations that they support
2. MISSION BLUE – engaging the global network of ocean organizations that they support
3. Individual Thought Leader Advisers in a diversity of capacities, from entrepreneurs to professors to leaders of organizations

PETRI [Planet Earth Teaching & Research Initiative] can harness the skills of a diverse network to the Global Grand Challenge of SAVING OUR OCEAN and REDUCING PLASTIC on Earth today.