Crowdsourcing Project as Part of Non-formal Education

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is the latest revolution brought by the digital technologies of computing and communication. It is a nowadays popular way of finding services, concepts, or content by asking contributions from a large group of people, particularly from users. According to Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing generally refers to the participatory online activity of calls for individuals to voluntarily undertake a task. The key elements of a crowdsourcing project are the open call format intended for an enormous network of potential contributors. It is a revolution that brings people together and harnesses their collective intelligence. Crowdsourcing in an online, distributed problem-solving model that pulls the collective intelligence of online communities to assist explicit goals. Online communities, or crowds, are given the opportunity to answer to crowdsourcing activities requested. In crowdsourcing, there is no clear frontier between the subjects of a research and the researchers themselves. It differs from traditional outsourcing as it involves a random, volunteer crowd and not previously selected group of individuals. A crowdsourcing - along with big data and citizen science – is a key part of an important scientific, methodological and educational phenomenon. With advent of crowdsourcing, a paradigm shift can be witnessed in information procurement, transfer, storage and processing as well as in learning. In the practice, crowdsourcing forms a firm bond with the phenomenon of wisdom of the crowds and user-generated content.