Quantcast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 11

Crowdsourcing: It’s Not New

“Crowdsourcing” is the e-learning community’s new in-vogue term. In actuality, it’s been “in vogue” for quite a few years, but it’s gone by other, less specific, names: social learning or collective intelligence.

Daren C. Brabham was the first to define “crowdsourcing” in the scientific publication Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (Feb. 1, 2008): “Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.”

Wikipedia gives a more formal definition: “Accessing a wider array of talent than might be present in one organization, and undertaking problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to submit problems on which contributors can work.”

Experts believe it’ll become even more popular in the future, at least partly because it’s a way for businesses to get more value from their employees.

“The rise of crowdsourcing is changing the world,” says Ross Dawson, co-author of Getting Results From Crowds: The Definitive Guide to Using Crowdsourcing to Grow Your Business. “In particular, crowdsourcing is transforming corporate marketing and the role of agencies, and how media and content are created. Understanding in detail the best examples of success in these fields opens up new pathways to creating massive value.”

Dr. Justin Marquis at OnlineUniversities.com further defines crowdsourcing (as it pertains to e-learning) as being controlled or managed, rather than Wikipedia’s completely open model. He further notes the advantages to crowdsourced instructional design:

>> financial savings through reduced overhead and benefits,

>> expanded technical abilities for [the learners] who will need to do the collaboration,

>> the possibility of higher-quality content production, and

>> a diversification of the views represented in the course materials produced.

“This final point, diversity of perspective, should not be undervalued,” Marquis adds. “Knowledge is not the sole and proprietary property of the content area expert. Incorporating a diverse design team into the creation of online educational content can increase the perspective on what is being created and help to mediate biases, oversights, or false assumptions that may exist and be perpetuated by a single individual working alone.”

Simon Burt, who contributes to a Trivantis blog, says that crowdsourcing “is vital in organizational social learning. Social learning in business settings is underpinned by several new business transformations, one of which is collaboration. Collaboration has the power to change business performance dramatically. At the center of the collaboration discussion is how well a business leverages it to deliver higher performance. Theory is one thing, but execution is another. And successful social business is all about successful execution.”

Of course, none of this is new to the astute learning professional. Learning management systems have included various crowdsourcing functions, and indications are that they will become more prevalent as time passes.

Crowdsourcing is just another way of sharing information that can make a business — or any organization, for that matter — more efficient and productive.

This article is copyright © 2013 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 11

Trending Articles