Learnersourcing in Theory and Practice: Synthesizing the Literature and Charting the Future
Anjali Singh, Christopher Brooks, Shayan Doroudi
Abstract
Given the growing interest in learnersourcing -- a pedagogically supported form of crowdsourcing that harnesses the knowledge and creativity of learners for the creation of learning resources -- we propose a theoretical framework to study, design, and deploy learnersourcing systems. By integrating ideas from crowdsourcing and learning theories focusing on learner-centered pedagogy, this work provides a review and classification of learnersourcing systems from the perspective of its three groups of stakeholders: (1) contributors, who are the learners who contribute new learning artifacts, (2) beneficiaries, who are the learners who learn from these artifacts, and (3) the instructional team who design and deploy learnersourcing tasks. The framework serves as a heuristic device for designing new learnersourcing systems and for considering the broader implications for learnersourcing in terms of workflow design, incentivizing contributors, quality-control, learning outcomes, delivering personalized learning experiences, ethical considerations, and its complementary relationship with AI in education.