Crowdsourcing

Higher participation levels and learning diversities are now challenging traditional
education. Evolved Internet platforms offer opportunities to address learner needs. More
and more educational agencies or individual educators are using the "wisdom of the
crowd" to promote creative education in various ways. Crowdsourcing improves creative
education with ample learning opportunities, state-of - the-art programs, versatile and
customized assistance, and feedback that is more comprehensive and diverse. We refer to
this new trend as "crowdsourcing for education" The idea of crowdsourcing has been
gaining popularity over time. Although the reference dates back to 1714 when Llorente
and Morant (2015) created a kind of crowdsourced competition where a prize would be
awarded to whoever created the best method for measuring a ship's longitude, the use of
educational crowdsourcing is a much more modern concept. Despite the ongoing
development of research on educational crowdsourcing, this analytical graph on the
concept of crowdsourcing shows how use has developed over time, peaking recently but
with a projected increase going forward. The image below was taken from the Google
Trends tool that shows how much buzz there is in searches around a particular term. The
image in this case represents the popularity of the term "crowdsourcing" in the search.

Crowdsourcing in Educational Activities:

"As teachers we frequently promote ourselves as facilitators rather than knowledge owners in our
modern role and yet when we reach the classroom too much of what we do appears to be
informing rather than asking." (Peachey, 2017) Using crowdsourcing techniques will question
the educator's traditional position in helping them understand being a facilitator in the physical
and virtual classroom spaces. There are a number of ways that educators today use
crowdsourcing to inform their practice directly and indirectly, engaging with their own growth
and conceptual frameworks that embrace the power learners bring, both in their position as
learners and in their individual skills and knowledge.
Like with many careers, teachers use crowdsourcing strategies to prepare for their position in the
classrooms. From crowdsourcing for their own professional development (Dunlap & Lowenthal,
2018) to using it to create teacher resources (Walker, 2019), teachers see this method as useful
for their own learning and growth.
It provides a conceptual model of implementation for crowdsourcing in educational activities,
which requires empirical validation. The model is guided by the study and synthesis of the case
studies and scientific literature. A typical educational institution, such as colleges, is inhabited by
students, instructors, scholars, administrators, and employees, and has a certain legal standing by
maintaining a partnership with government and accreditation bodies. Educational organizations
like all other companies have their fair share of issues. Such challenges come in all shapes and
sizes and can seem endless at times. To address these issues, the normal method of attack
includes sending out surveys, forming committees, setting up forums and recruiting consultants.
There could be a new way to solve problems — crowdsourcing. Because virtual relationships are
now possible and have become popular outside educational settings, management of the
educational institutions should take into account the workforce included in the crowd. First of all,
all sorts of networks (Facebook, Ning, Twitter), webcams, Skype, etc. modified the very
presence meaning. Second, the technology that is a part of the team has improved. Some of the
infrastructure-related tasks can be subcontracted or outsourced elsewhere. For example, a teacher
can deliver lectures via podcast, instead of delivering lectures in person.
In an organization, there are so many ways to use crowdsourcing, and the author of the research
separated ways to implement it into two groups: instructional tasks and supporting tasks. The
Web platform allows the collective intelligence to be harnessed within a population in ways that
face-to-face contact cannot, due to time limitations, location limitations, etc. This argues that the
crowdsourcing model, a competitive, Web-based, distributed business model for problem solving
and development, is a suitable model for enabling educational organizations in their processes.
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a critical component of online education, as it encourages the
accessibility and exchange of resources and information that groups contribute.

Histogram showing the highest level of education of crowd workers. This image is a histogram
showing the differing levels of education which the crowd workers reported to have. This
information includes crowd workers from the test groups that performed the first HIT in
2013 and 2014; that's 336 crowd employees.
A. Histogram showing the percentage of agreement in each party as opposed to majority
and expert consensus. Fig 8A is a histogram that contrasts the answers of each party with
majority and expert consensus. Those figures included only crowd staff who completed
all thirteen HITs with twelve or fewer missed responses. The most common answers of each
group were calculated, this set of answers was called the majority consensus. A higher majority
consensus indicates a higher group consistency.

In Fig 8B, all crowd workers who completed all thirteen HITs with twelve or fewer missing
answers were included in these calculations. The performance was measured as each participant's
score in comparison with the expert. The widths reflect the number of individuals in each group.
The y-axis represents the percentage of "ground truth" agreement with the expert on whether to
keep a given graph. The average crowd worker’s “score” (~79%) is higher than that of the
graduate student “score” (~68%).

Crowdsourcing Educational Tasks

Due to the emergence of Web 2.0 and 3.0 internet technologies which facilitate new forms of
learning in adaptive online environments, educational activities have evolved significantly over
the past decade. New communication technologies have begun to transform the way society
understands and approaches teaching and learning, giving us new ways to communicate, exploit
and exchange learning content and providing a forum for a more interactive learning experience.
Evolved internet technologies allow the co-creationof learning by learners and educators.
Crowdsourcing in the creation and use of educational materials allows user groups and other
stakeholders to use webtools to maximize collaboration and generate materials. Such
community-based design can help capture, refine, enforce, systematize or evaluate aspects of
online learning materials. This chapter is intended to discuss current methods used by
educational organizations by using crowdsourcing. We will note the first use of crowdsourcing in
data collection and analytics. Many notable activities are cooperation between university science
organizations and students, or even general public. NASA's Click workers is a project involving
space enthusiasts in classifying crater patterns on Mars. For example, Screensaver Project
(Oxford University with the National Cancer Research Foundation), SETI (Extraterrestrial
Intelligence Analysis), Quake-Catcher Network Turn your laptop into a seismic sensor
(QCNLive). The most important dimension of crowdsourcing is the one involving students and
young researchers in addressing big and relevant problems. Gretchen LeBuh, associate professor
of biology at San Francisco State University, founded the Great Sunflower Project in 2008 with
the remaining grant money. The University of Alabama requires the public to contribute through
their library in two initiatives. We allow users to "tag" or "transcribe" materials from existing
collections, so they can identify objects, locations and events in the content from the comfort of
their own computer users. That helps to generate content that is crowdsourced. Crowdsourced
content is often used to build classroom programmers and to design textbooks. Writing and
publishing a full book is and has been a daunting task to deal with by one or a few people. Non-
professional enthusiasts have the ability to engage with others in producing new styles of books,
with the aid of crowd sourcing. Hundreds of people interested in literacy and lesson design could
pick interesting areas and create extremely interesting, insightful, linked, and centered lessons.

There are several benefits to the crowdsourcing of a book— up-to-date articles, case studies and
results, reduced expense, immersive learning and student involvement— but one must bear in
mind that crowdsourced projects need time and energy to organize the collective writing and
review process to ensure that the final result is useful to learners and that progress is preserved.
Nevertheless, crowdsourcing is evolving as a way in which professors, teachers and other
curriculum experts not only generate textbook curriculum but also handle multiple contributors '
collective writing processes and customize items for use in their courses. New online resources
and information will enable crowdsourcing to be used even more in educational activities.

There are many ways in which students participate effectively in crowdsourcing by organized
facilitation by educators. Corneli and Mikroyannidis (2012) suggest the importance of
facilitation as peer learning is not sufficient to ensure a successful and positive learning
environment itself. Based on the composition and function of the facilitators in the classroom, it
will help to create a sense of comrade and engagement and work to keep students engaging with
their peers.

One important way for students to engage with crowdsourcing through instructor facilitation is to
work together to complete a joint project. Named "crowd learning," by exploiting their individual
and unique abilities, students are required to communicate and teach each other (Llorente &
Morant, 2015). Examples of this activity include our research on developing this eBook and
individual eChapters as well as the example from Preston's video where students worked
together to create a Mind Map that would have taken a person longer period of time and only
reflected a single perspective.

Another effective way for students to participate in organized crowdsourcing could be through
the development and implementation of evaluation tools. Though Llorente and Morant (2015)
are concentrating on more conventional attempts at peer assessment. There are also some
pedagogies which involve students in more in-depth evaluation. A great example is Kochmider
and Buschfeld (2016), who were working with students to create exam questions and answers
that should be taken by all students. By developing this set of exam questions, carefully
evaluating what would represent a correct answer, and preparing for the exam itself, students not
only had the opportunity to participate in constructive learning activities, but also played a role in
defining their own and peers ' achievements. The above video also provides a fantastic example
of Trevor and Ian demonstrating their interface for peer evaluation.

Approach Advantages for learners System disadvantages

Collaborative projects Socialization within group Potential for no individual
accountability

Supplemental Instruction Socialization within group

(SI) Content placed in immediate User-initiated (not embedded)
problem context

Open Educational Resources Socialization within group Lack of personal direction

(OER) User control

Public content Opportunity for reflection Absence of assessment and

Motivation from participation feedback
Peer assessment Motivation from participation Possible system manipulation
Problem-Based Learning Motivation from participation Requires external experts
(PBL) Socialization within group
Content placed in immediate
problem context
Serious games Motivation from participation Expensive to develop
Socialization within group
Content placed in immediate
problem context
Intrinsic motivation for
learners
and mentors

Conclusion:
People want to be interested in and work on important projects. The positive outcomes from the
use of crowdsourcing from universities, colleges and high schools indicate that the best person to
do a job is the one who wants to do the work the most. How many former professors, instructors,
educators and others still want to contribute? So many people enjoy school, and have important
skills and knowledge, but work outside of school in fields? Those and several related questions
are what drives educational crowdsourcing. After researching potential ways to use it in
educational programs, a debate about why organizations can crowdsource their operations needs
to be followed up. Perhaps relevant of all the advantages, crowdsourcing gives the participating
students a range of benefits. Crowdsourcing, for example, offers students real life experience in
coming up with innovative approaches to critical issues. Students can apply classroom expertise
to issues in the real world and learn from a realistic viewpoint the ins and outs of their chosen
fields. It often alludes to the consistency of the requisite solutions. Students know the culture,
and therefore have a better shot at developing approaches that truly meet the needs of the
community.
References
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