CREATING AND IMPROVING EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS: AN APPROACH BASED ON CROWDSOURCING

One way of increasing the quantity and quality of educational materials that are available on-line is to apply collaborative and crowdsourcing techniques during the production process. The idea of involving groups of learners working together to solve a problem, to complete a task, or to create a product is an educational approach to teach and learn called Collaborative Learning.

In this paper we present an approach based on crowdsourcing to involve students in the creation and improvement of educational materials that serve for the study and/or self-learning of certain knowledge included in university subjects. The creation of educational materials following this approach allows the development of an extensive repository of educational content that can be shared and reused within the educational community.

In our approach, the active participation of students in creating and improving educational materials is performed by using a collaborative authoring platform called the SlideWiki platform (http://slidewiki.org/). The SlideWiki platform allows users to create and maintain slide presentations (among other types of educational materials) in a crowdsourcing and on-line fashion. This platform aims to promote the consolidation of prior knowledge, to avoid duplication of efforts in the creation of educational material (promoting the reuse of existing materials), as well as to share good practices.

The SlideWiki platform can be seen as a Web 2.0 technology in which users can be active contributors rather than just passive observers. The materials developed by active users may have significant innovation and economic value. This collective intelligence can be used for both instructors and students to create education materials that can have great value.

Our educational approach is based on the execution of the following activities:
(1) Design of the learning activities to be carried out and their creation in the SlideWiki platform;
(2) Selection of the educational materials needed for the activities and their incorporation in the SlideWiki platform;
(3) Design and creation of questionnaires to gather the opinions of the students;
(4) Completion of the proposed learning and educational activities;
(5) Gathering students opinions;
(6) Analysis of the data collected in the questionnaires;
(7) Proposal of changes in the educational approach.

The design of the learning activities to be carried out in our approach is based on a catalog of activities (https://slidewiki.org/deck/108357/learning-activity-catalogue-for-students-and-participants).

This catalog serves as a support to teachers during the preparation of the tasks that students must complete in the courses. Our proposal focuses on the following educational activities:
(a) to provide comments to a selection of educational content;
(b) to summarize in 5 points a certain topic relevant to the subject;
(c) to create a collection of questions for self-evaluation; and
(d) to collaboratively create solutions to proposed exercises.

The crowdsourcing approach presented in this paper will be applied in diverse subjects belonging to the Artificial Intelligence area in different university courses. To evaluate the proposed approach, we will:
(a) gather students opinions via questionnaires,
(b) apply learning analytics techniques to compare subject results along different courses, and (c) analyze official surveys on the teaching activity.