Crowdsourcing and education: Towards a theory and praxis of learnersourcing

Abstract

Due to the scale of online environments, large numbers of learners interact with the exact same resources, such as online math homework problems and videos. It is therefore essential these are of the highest quality to help learners. Ideally, online educational resources would constantly improve based on data and input from each learner, giving a better outcome for the next. This symposium explores issues around the use of crowdsourcing to harness learners’ interactions with resources like online problems and videos in order to improve these resources for the next learner. We hope to explore the benefits and limitations of thinking about learners through the lens of crowdsourcing, to imagine learnersourcing. We will discuss four ways in which researchers have leveraged crowdsourcing to help students learn in a variety of educational contexts, and in doing so we will also discuss ways in which educational theory can guide the future of learnersourcing.