e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Essential Update #5 - Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a method of attaining data that involves collecting opinions, answers, or facts by making a request to the public or a specific community, and then collating the data to help find a definiteive answer.

In an education setting, crowdsourcing can be extremely effective at illiciting discussion as well as finding statistics realting to a specific topic and using that result to find a common denominator amongst a student group.

Applications like Mentimeter and other similar live crowdsourcing applications make for great live presentation work where students can use their mobile phones in real time to communicate their thoughts to a professor in real time and has been used to great effect in my personal experience.

Live results from Mentimeter

Crowdsourcing in this way can lead to an exchange of knowledge between student and teacher in a way that was previously unavailable to educators. It allows the group as a whole to contribute to problem-solving and the learning process. It also gives a sense of pride to the entirety of the learning process as both student and teacher feel ownership of the lessons being learned.

Crowdsourcing among instructors and educational institutes also offers advantages. Shared lesson plans allow instructors and teachers to combine their skills and knowledge to create a more rounded and complete learning experience. 

Speficially for topics covering historical knowledge, and even more effectively local historical knowledge, crowdsourcing through simple platforms such as social media or email can very quickly and efficiently give a huge boost to a curriculum, and great learning opportunities for teacher and students alike.

One of the immediate downsides to crowdsourcing in education is the lack of a standardized platform. There are hundreds of crowdsourcing options out there and each institution tends to use something different, which can create barriers to cross-collaboration. I would hope that as crowdsourcing in education becomes more prevalent that a more standardized approach would be taken to what platform is used, as crowdsourcing is most effective when everyone involved is using the same forum.

One of the problems inherent in crowdsourcing for education is finding a standardized platform

Crowdsourcing for educational purposes, whether it be feedback, collaboration between educational professionals or as a lesson tool, will hopefully continue it's rise and hopefully find even more effective ways to support a new paradigm of educational reform where students are involved with much more than just memorization of classroom material.

 

Sources:

https://ideascalenation.medium.com/three-real-world-examples-of-crowdsourcing-in-education-ae470d3a8ef6

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Schlagwein-2/publication/326235193_A_Review_on_Crowdsourcing_for_Education_State_of_the_Art_of_Literature_and_Practice/links/5b3fee6f458515f71cad02b0/A-Review-on-Crowdsourcing-for-Education-State-of-the-Art-of-Literature-and-Practice.pdf

https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2017/innovation-education-through-crowdsourcing/19341

  • Noor Ali
  • Fahad alHarth