A couple of months ago I made a small speech at the Brussels European Crowdsourcing event. My focus was the increasing importance of Mobile Broadband Connectivity in general and the Internet of things (IOT) in particular will have as accelerator for crowdsourcing.
Little did I know that I would be talking crowdsourcing all evening in be it a totally different context…
….my 16 years old daughter Tatiana was up in arms with a Fysics test she had to … not prepare for… but actually help design the questions of the test herself.
Specifically, recapping the task : the class was devided in eight groups of 3 students. Each group had to deliver five test questions out of a Fysics 5 chapters. The teacher will then pick at randum 10 questions from the total of 40 questions.
Making test questions it turned out is much harder than learning answers.
Moreover, as to be expected, these digital kids shared ahead of time all the questions AND answers they each had developed … so defeating the purpose of a test right ? Well not so much as now everybody was studying 40 questions !
So croudsourcing the questions provided a dedactical collaboration rarely achieved before – the dedactical power was in the journey, the engagement between students more than in the finality of the test.
To conclude, schools often focus on the “infrastructure” part of digitalization. I don’t enough hear schools reinvent their primary mission which is to educate as best as they can. The Kan accademy with their ‘flipping the class room” is one of the good examples, the MOOC as well. The crowdsourcing of testing is now way up there for me as another example 😉
Stéphane Beauduin 