Is there a role for Crowdsourcing in education? It seems to me that the “former audience” or the "crowd" could be of benefit to education if focused on the right areas and provided the opportunity.
Jeff Howe writes in his new book Crowdsoucring that, “Over the past several years people from around the world have begun exhibiting an almost totally unprecedented social behavior: they are coming together to perform tasks, usually for little of no money, that were once the sole province of employees.”
Certainly education could benefit from Crowdsourcing based on this description. A school district and a school site have many tasks that are essential, but that require time and energy that could be used to focus on instruction. Most school districts are looking for expertise in a variety of areas, areas that do not lend themselves to naturally to the skill set of most teachers or administrators. I could imagine using Crowdsoucing in several areas such as…
Data Analysis
One of the most time consuming tasks for educators is data analysis. Since most educators did not major in statistics or data analysis, why not open up the data to people who have expertise in this field, have a love for the task, and have the time and desire to effectively synthesize and evaluate student data. Simply using generic I.D. number for students and teacher would allow for privacy and since most schools and districts are using or moving toward data management systems, all of the data could be accessed online. You may not like to analyze data, but there are plenty of people who do and who are very good at. Why not let them do it? Students and teacher would definitely benefit.
Budget Analysis
Districts have staff that focus on analysis of budgets and finances. But, in these times of decreasing budgets, multiple funding sources, grants, categorical programs, etc., why not let people with an interest in budgets have access to the information to aid in the analysis of the budget and increase the efficiency of budget process in school districts. Tapping into a crowd of budgetary expertise could help districts maximize their funds to the benefit of all.
Purchasing
A purchasing agent for a school district has a limited amount of time to shop vendors. Therefore, they limit themselves to a number of trusted, steady, and reliable vendors for their purchasing needs. Imagine if the task was Crowdsourced. People from all over could go online in their free time and find values, deals, and competitive pricing for virtually hundreds of vendors. Instead of shopping one or two vendors for pricing, hundreds of vendors could be shopped for the best pricing. This would allow a school district to save thousands of dollars a year.
Lesson Design
Imagine if you had the time to layer English Language Arts with English Language Development, and Social Studies or Science to create a seamless flow of lessons that address essential standards in the classroom. This is a great idea, but the reality is that teachers do not have the time to research all these curriculum areas and find areas to layer and connect. But the “crowd” does. Hundreds of people with an interest in literacy and lesson design could choose areas of interest and create amazingly interesting, deep, connected, and focused lessons. Imagine a Threadless like lesson plan site where people create lessons that are evaluated and voted up and down by people who love lesson design, curriculum, and pedagogy.
“The best person to do a job is the one who most wants to do that job; and the best people to evaluate their performance are their friends and peers who, by the way, will enthusiastically pitch in to improve the final product, simply for the sheer pleasure of helping one another and creating something beautiful from which they will all benefit.”
Could education benefit from a Threadless, Linux, Flickr, Wikipedia, YourEncore, InnoCentive, distributed computing, iStockPhoto, Apache, and other Crowdsource endeavors? I think yes.
People want to participate and to collaborate on important projects. What could be more important than making our education system the best it could be. How many retired teachers, educators, and other professionals would still like to contribute? How many people love education, have valuable skills and expertise, but work in fields outside of education? The "crowd" doesn't care who you are, what you do, where you went to school, if you went to school, or what your expertise is. All that matters is you have something to contribute. Let the “crowd” have a go.
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