19 Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the combination of the terms “crowd” and “outsourcing.” It originated in the business world as the practice of soliciting and obtaining solutions, ideas, and content from a large, loosely defined group of people rather than from small groups of known or “expert” sources. In digital participatory cultures, activities identified as crowdsourced often vary in quality across a spectrum of contributory, collaborative, and co-creative activities. Crowdsourcing enables students to do the following:
- Engage in participatory learning
- Capitalize on and develop an appreciation for collective IQ
- Develop digital literacy and communication skills
- Create products for an authentic audience or with a broader scope than possible alone
Practice examples
- Annotated class anthology: Students collaboratively annotate course readings with definitions, supplemental resources, or background information.
- Annotated bibliography: Students read or watch and then evaluate materials in a shared document or spreadsheet.
- Crowdsourcing online video: Students contribute brief narratives or perspectives, usually in video format, to create a larger digital story.
- Note-taking: Students take course notes together within shared documents. Note-taking can be structured as an individual, small group, or whole class activity.
- Participatory syllabus: Students help design the course syllabus in a shared document or wiki.
- Resource development: Students curate Web resources for a shared collection that can live beyond the duration of the course.
Additional resources
- Hills, T. T. (2015). Crowdsourcing content creation in the classroom. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(1), 47–67. doi: 10.1007/s12528-015-9089-2
- Littauer, R., Scheidel, A., Schulder, M., & Ciddi, S. (2015). Crowdsourcing the classroom: Interactive applications in higher learning. Proceedings of EDULEARN12 Conference, 1473–1481.
- Tucker, C. (2013, Apr 18). Crowdsourcing information in the classroom.
