Crowdsourcing and application in education

Crowdsourcing refers that individuals or organizations obtain goods and services, including ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to submit problems on which contributors can work, on topics such as science, manufacturing, biotech, and medicine, with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Although crowdsourcing complicated tasks can be difficult, simple work tasks can be crowdsourced cheaply and effectively (Excerpt from Wikipedia). In particular, the crowdsourcing can be found in web environments which have characteristics of openness and flexibility.  

However, there are some limitations of crowdsourcing like other sociology concepts.

1.   Impact of crowdsourcing on product quality

2.   Entrepreneurs contribute less capital themselves

3.   Increased number of funded ideas

4.   The value and impact of the work received from the crowd

5.   The ethical implications of low wages paid to crowdworkers

6.   Trustworthiness and informed decision making

When I was searching for the meaning of the crowdsourcing, there was a little suspicion of application into educational settings. Because the phenomenon looked broad, the concept looked overlapped with other concepts of social constructivism. However, I have been learning that one phenomenon can be explained differently depending on which framework you wear so I tried to follow the concepts of crowdsourcing and understand the result. 

In educational settings, Wilson (2018) described the process of a lesson applied to the crowdsourcing in history class, and the college students produced teaching materials by themselves for a semester. Through individual study and collaboration activities, the author found that crowdsourcing promoted self-instruction, authentic learning, etc.

From reading those articles and contents, some research questions came up with. 

As well as formal classroom environments, I thought crowdsourcing can be adapted to informal learning. As informal learning is a pervasive ongoing phenomenon of learning via participation or learning via knowledge creation, which is not like traditional classrooms. For example, Reddit shows the representative features of crowdsourcing in informal learning environments. And communities have the crowdsourcing features too because members participate in the community to share information, ideas, or resources. 

Meanwhile, crowdsourcing produces social capital via engagement in activities. Kilpatrick et al. (2010) said social capital is a useful framework to analyze lifelong learning and its relationship in communities. Social capital has been used to explain the improved performance of diverse groups, the growth of business, human performance, enhanced supply chain relations, and the evolution of communities. It would be a great try to track crowdsourcing phenomenon in communities using social capital theory to understand how people make knowledge and what kind of information they produce. 

Kilpatrick, S., & Mulford, B. (2010). Social capital, educational institutions and leadership. International encyclopedia of education, 113-119.

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.