My learning path this week led me to explore the concept of crowdsourcing. I was starting from beyond scratch as I automatically related it to cases of crowdfunding, both terms being often used interchangeably.
Exploring some of our readings helped me grasp the concept much clearer and see the potential as well as the concerns raised around the open call for contribution for knowledge sharing or task achievement purposes. Though I had plenty of questions surrounding the ethical & legal aspects of this strategy for commercial or healthcare purposes, I was more intrigued about the usefulness of crowdsourcing for educational purposes. The experience shared by Matthew Charles Wilson (2018) was enlightening as it allowed me to reflect on a recent project we led in my institution with a teacher.
Very shortly, I am supporting a teacher in revamping a hybrid course to enhance interaction and students' proactivity. To that end, I suggested that students build their own resources throughout the course to enhance interactive learning and so that the multiple perspectives of understanding could help each learner in processing new knowledge. Note that students were divided into 4 groups of 20 people during the whole semester. For the last activity, we first asked them to identify individually their higher level of mastery through a list compiling the various parts of the course. Then, the teacher matched students in pairs to work collectively on a synthesized job aid for this specific part of the course. Because there were 4 groups, this activity resulted in 4 different versions of the same topic. Once the resources were reviewed and validated by faculty, they were gathered into a collection of job aids that students could use during the final exam.
In his paper, Wilson explained the multiple benefits of implementing crowdsourcing in his classroom which aimed initially at creating a resource that could be reused in future classes. Eventually, this experiment also allowed students to be more engaged and proactive in their own learning. For now (our experimentation is still in progress), students report they enjoy the co-construction of resources as they appreciated the collective mindset during the course. However, for this very last activity, many students asked questions about the purpose of this activity. "Why are we doing this? What's the point?"
After giving them some thought, I realized that these questions, which were a bit unexpected, showed that the goal of building knowledge and concrete resources through the input of a large number of people was far from obvious. Though Wilson highlighted the benefit of crowdsourcing in his class, he did not mention how he explained the "why" of using crowdsourcing to his students, nor if he even had to explain the concept at all.
For my current experimentation using a personal approach of crowdsourcing, I realized that students are used to learning individually, and that building knowledge as a collective is not intuitive.
I am a firm proponent of situated learning, renewable assignments, and open pedagogy (chapter 10 of Driscoll & Burner (2022) elaborates more on these concepts). However, I am now fully aware that these innovative instructional strategies are still new to both faculty and students (and more generally to teachers and learners). As an instructional designer, I now plan to dedicate a specific time when designing instruction and when implementing crowdsourcing, in order to present the concept and its usefulness and to address every concern as well as questions raised by teachers and learners.
Reference: Wilson, M. C. (2018). Crowdsourcing and self-instruction: Turning the production of teaching materials Into a learning objective. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(3), 400-408. doi:10.1080/15512169.2017.1415813
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