Abstract
<p>The widespread availability of high-quality Web-based content offers new potential for supporting teachers as designers of curricula and classroom activities. When coupled with a participatory Web culture and infrastructure, teachers can share their creations as well as leverage from the best that their peers have to offer to support a collective intelligence or crowdsourcing community, which we dub <em>crowdteaching</em>. We applied a collective intelligence framework to characterize crowdteaching in the context of a Web-based tool for teachers called the Instructional Architect (IA). The IA enables teachers to find, create, and share instructional activities (called IA projects) for their students using online learning resources. These IA projects can further be viewed, copied, or adapted by other IA users. This study examines the usage activities of two samples of teachers, and also analyzes the characteristics of a subset of their IA projects. Analyses of teacher activities suggest that they are engaging in crowdteaching processes. Teachers, on average, chose to share over half of their IA projects, and copied some directly from other IA projects. Thus, these teachers can be seen as both contributors to and consumers of crowdteaching processes. In addition, IA users preferred to view IA projects rather than to completely copy them. Finally, correlational results based on an analysis of the characteristics of IA projects suggest that several easily computed metrics (number of views, number of copies, and number of words in IA projects) can act as an indirect proxy of instructionally relevant indicators of the content of IA projects.</p>
Highlights
Teachers have long been designing and modifying curricula and lesson plans (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Brown & Edelson, 2003; Fogleman, McNeil, & Krajcik, 2011; Remillard, 2005)
The Instructional Architect (IA) provides an infrastructure for collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, which we dub crowdteaching, in which teachers can create, share, and iteratively adapt instructional activities using open educational resources (OER), leveraging from their peers’ work to best serve the needs of their students (Benkler, 2006; Borgman et al, 2008; Porcello & Hsi, 2013)
The second sample, PD participants, was drawn from a teacher professional development (PD) opportunity centered around use of the IA conducted in a western U.S state
Summary
Teachers have long been designing and modifying curricula and lesson plans (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Brown & Edelson, 2003; Fogleman, McNeil, & Krajcik, 2011; Remillard, 2005) This phenomenon, called teachers as designers, has drawn renewed interest (e.g., Davis & Varma, 2008), prompted in part by the widespread availability of high-quality online resources, called open educational resources (OER), via the Internet. Our approach for supporting teachers as designers is via a free, Web-based authoring tool called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu), which enables teachers to find and design instructional activities for their students using OER (Recker, 2006) Teachers can share these resulting activities, called IA projects, by making them publically available within the IA. The IA provides an infrastructure for collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, which we dub crowdteaching, in which teachers can create, share, and iteratively adapt instructional activities using OER, leveraging from their peers’ work to best serve the needs of their students (Benkler, 2006; Borgman et al, 2008; Porcello & Hsi, 2013)
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