The State-of-the-Art on Collective Intelligence in Online Educational Technologies

Abstract

The application of the collective intelligence (CI) concept has yielded significant results in many knowledge areas and it has substantial potential to yield results in the educational context. In view of distance education and online educational technologies, the use of CI has enormous potential to improve collaboration, social learning, and problem solving. However, there is still not a clear understanding of how CI has been used in combination with online educational technologies, due to a lack of secondary studies in this context. Thus, in this article, we conducted a systematic literature review with the objectives of determining how CI has been used in online learning environments and identifying the benefits and/or the difficulties that are encountered in the process of its use. We have analyzed 354 studies and only 30 have met our inclusion criteria. The main contributions to online learning of these 30 studies were categorized and discussed. Our results have shown that CI enables the exploration. of the potential of collaboration and collaborative learning in social environments to create more diverse educational contents and to improve educational aspects using group intelligence. Moreover, approximately 74% of the studies presented positive evidence of learning benefits. However, approximately 40% of the studies also presented positive evidence of implementation difficulties. These and other results presented in this article demonstrate that more research is necessary to explore the potential of CI in online learning technologies.