Models of Crowdsourcing Applied to Family Life Education

In his book, Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe, identifies four general models of crowdsourcing-- crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting and crowd funding. Each of these models can be applied to the creation of family life education websites.

Crowding sourcing wisdom about family life.

Although we have significant information about human development and families, there are still many applications to particular challenges or particular children that reside in the daily experience of individual parents and family members that could be helpful to others. Most family life educators who work with groups (F2F or online) know the value of inviting the participants to share their strategies and ideas about questions and issues facing one another. In open social networking sites for parents you see a lot of this type of discussion. One parent poses a challenge and others suggest ways to deal with the situation. Sometimes bad advice is offered, but often times there are helpful suggestions. There are many ways to extend and encourage this crowd sourced wisdom from family members.

Crowd creation of family life educational experiences.

Family life education sites can move beyond simply capturing the wisdom of family members and involve families in designing and developing the educational experiences. Family members could be included in serving as a moderator of open forums of parent discussions. Participants might monitor topics of interest to particular families (for example, parents of children with autism) to identify hot, relevant, or new issues. Participants could be invited to write, record or video content that to illustrate a particular point. (Note: There are many developmental issues in the lives of children that can most easily be illustrated by video better than words. Family life education would be powerfully advanced by having easy access to short video clips of these developmental milestones. Asking parents to provide video examples of developmental milestones would dramatically increase the our ability to help parents understand human development and enrich the text descriptions of these topics.)

Crowd voting in family life education.

The simple version of "crowd voting" is to ask readers of family life education websites to rate articles, videos, etc. on usefulness or other qualities. Participants can also be asked to write reviews or reactions to topics. (this may be more crowd creation than voting.) Clearly, if a family life educational website were successful in gathering crowd created material, there would be many opportunities to include the participants in rating and commenting on the various creations.

Crowd funding of family life education.

At present the most common model of funding on the Internet has been an advertiser model. There are still relatively few examples in which people contribute to the funding of content delivery. One model that might work for family life education is the model used by ESPN and tried by several newspapers in which much of the content is available for free, but their is some "in-depth content" created by the most popular commentators that is only available by subscription. This might work in family life education settings. Another version of this would be to offer more individualized experiences for participants that would provide more in-depth support or help through a paid subscription process.

Summary.

There are numerous opportunities to engage parents and other family members in "crowd-based" strategies for interacting, developing and advancing family life education. This is an important area of further exploration.

CrowdSourcing Higher Education: The Sturgeon's Law Impasse

One of the major reasons that educators are resistant to opening up education so that many people can participate in the creation of learning experiences is the worry that most of the material created will be badly done.

It is not that educators see their own work as perfect, but they remain skeptical that "committed amateur educators" would produce high quality learning experiences. This concern, sometimes called Sturgeon's Law or Revelation, holds that 90% of the material created by individuals is very low quality and at best 10% of the material will be useful and of high quality. Based on this idea, most educators are not willing to risk trying to find the 10% of valuable material in the face of the 90% of worthless material. They are also concerned that the worthless material will damage the the reputation of their good material.

In designing in open education system that allows for many people to develop content and learning experiences, this issue will have to be faced and a system designed to deal with this problem.

Is there a model that would change educators' views on this issue? Are their tools that would provide an easy way to sift through the material to find the 10%?

Early Learning Educational Platform-- Required Features

Here is a working list of the features and tools that would be available in a robust early learning educational platform.

• Need to create an educational and technical framework within which a variety of short and extended educational experiences can be incorporated.

• Needs to have a sustainable development and maintenance system in which people can contribute for short periods and be replaced without major disruption to the enterprise.

• Needs to be scalable so that the work can grow and yet still be managed.

• Needs to take advantage of existing material and accommodate new material.

• Needs to be able to handle text, audio and video formats…and any new formats.
  

• Needs to be able to use a variety of levels of manpower in effective ways—interested amateurs, county level extension staff, non-extension professionals, state-level extension staff, university faculty without extension appointments, undergraduate and graduate students.
  

• Includes convenient ways for people to contribute individually without much much efforts (e.g., Wikipedia model—in which when you encounter any page, you can register and contribute).

• Includes a range of short (e.g., text FAQs, 1 minute video or audio clips, etc.) and extended educational experiences
  

• Should include educational experiences that serve a range of types of learners from one-time, specific questions to in-depth experiences that would result in college credit. The platform would include all the levels in between.

• Needs to have ways for contributors to get credit.

• Needs to be designed in ways that foster credibility with the audiences. This might be different at different levels of the educational experiences.
  

• For each type of “contribution” there needs to be easy tools to use to contribute. For example, there are just a few steps to follow to upload a video onto YouTube. Likewise, on Wikipedia, the text editor is right there to use.
  

• There needs to be a variety of instructional tools—a text FAQ maker, a quiz maker, a tool to build an educational path that links a series of FAQs into a longer educational experience (from text FAQ to a factsheet that combines several FAQs to a series of factsheets that might be the equivalent of a “book chapter,” a series of chapters that might compose a book or course text.

• Other instructional tools would be a quiz maker that might use the FAQs, a data collection tool such as survey maker for collecting information that may serve as a variety of feedback, educational and scientific purposes, data presentation tools or ways to easily display charts and graphs, presentation tools or ways to incorporate audio & slides, or text and slides, or video, and probably more.
  

• Another instructional tool might be a “story-telling” tool that fosters the development of richer examples of understanding human development and family life concepts.
  

• This platform should include a variety of opportunities for social networking and community-building.

• What else?
  

Crowdsourcing Parent Education

Most professionals who are engaged in teaching parent education and other family-related issues are generally reluctant to embrace the crowdsourcing idea of working with parents and family members.

First, although few people would claim to be experts on physics, chemistry, engineering, software development, etc., almost everyone thinks they are are an expert on raising children and managing families. Second, although many people would agree that there physics, chemistry, etc. are based on science, fewer would agree that behavioral or social science information is much better than commonsense.

So within this context, should behavioral and social scientists engage in developing crowdsourced educational activities in which ordinary people have a chance to create and exchange knowledge and insight about parenting and family matters? This leads to a whole series of questions and puzzles about how do you manage the potential of inaccurate information. What does this do to the credibility of our scientific knowledge about parenting and human development when "untrained" people are allowed to provide insights and advice about parenting, etc?

What risks do you run of being the source of damaging or very inappropriate ideas?

Despite the risks, I am on the side that professionals should invite the "crowd" into the creation of education for parents and families. Although there is potential for misinformation, I think there is much more promise of wise, thoughtful information. With the use of "moderators" and other techniques, misinformation can be a way of correcting parents ideas about various issues rather than treat this information as a problem.

At present we generally don't know the extent to which misinformation is common in forums, chatrooms and social network sites for parents. I know of no efforts to examine these sites to see the degree to which accurate or inaccurate information is being exchanged.

Before we abandon the idea of crowdsourcing parent education, let's see what is really happening.

eLearning Infrastructure: A Model

(Note: This continues the development of my ideas about an early learning educational platform.)

Building a learning community not only requires us to think about how we structure the interaction, we also have to think about how we structure the learning. In these figures I conceptualize a model for how learning might be structured in elearning settings.

The general idea in this model is that learning is structured from quick solutions or answers to more complex learning experiences that engage people in problem-solving and deeper explorations of ideas.

Next, I have tried to think about the continuum of learning experiences that would fit into this framework. In this second figure I have tried to identify the range of instructional methods that would fit into this learning infrastructure.




The most elemental forms of learning would seem to be questions and answers. Online this is often referred to as "frequently asked questions." (See previous discussion of "FAQS.") This format has been used a a variety of learning situations and seems like a good place to begin building a learning structure. FAQs do not have to always be text. There can be audio and video "answers" to questions just as easily as there can be "text" answers to questions. The next step in this structure would be increasing the length or depth of answers to questions in a sequence. A simple version of this idea would be a short article composed of a string of FAQs that would describe a more complex topic. Next, I use the term "microlearning" activities to refer to simple interactions with learners. Here I am thinking about quizzes, surveys, true-false tests, and so forth.

The next stage begins to put learners in each other's company so that they begin to learn together. The previous material is generally designed as individual learning. I have chosen the term "peer discussions" for this next phase. At this moment in time the discussions would probably take place in social networking sites in which participants would be invited to talk to each other (in a semi-guided fashion) on topics relevant to the educational activity or subject of study.

The final level in this model is a stage in which "feedback" is added to the learning process. Although it is possible for "peer discussions" about a topic to result in feedback to students, this stage explicitly adds the idea that learners are given tasks, activities and assignments in which they will get feedback about their ideas, understanding and mastery of a topic. I have chosen not to refer to this level as "graded and tested" but rather to emphasize "feedback." Although "grades" are often given in situations, the purpose is to provide a "summary" of the feedback.

Building an Online Early Learning Professional Development Community

Designing online learning communities remains on the important challenges for educators. In other postings I have written about the roles for learners in communities and tried to describe general ideas for creating online communities.

In this post, I want to develop an outline for how to create a community focused on child care, parenting, and early learning to elaborate my ideas about online learning communities.

At the moment I mostly have questions rather than answers.

1. Can we create a community that includes for parents and professionals?

There are lots of overlap in terms of the types of issues and concerns faced by both parents and child care professionals. They are both interested in healthy development-- helping children grow, learn, eat nutritiously, be safe, etc. There are some differences especially between those professionals who care for children in centers with multiple children versus a parent with only one child. There are fewer differences between a family child care provider and a parent.

2. What advantages or disadvantages might there be to developing a parent-professional learning community?

The biggest advantage would be that parents and professionals could learn from each other and see the issues that they share in common. The disadvantage is that professionals may want to ask questions and raise issues that they would prefer be discussed within the professional community rather than in the presence of parents. Likewise, parents may be interested in hearing from other parents about issues rather than from professionals on some issues.

3. How would learning be organized?

I would create microlearning opportunities such as short audio, text, and video material that address a single issue, problem or idea such that these microlearning experiences could be assembled into larger learning activities such as lessons, courses, and so forth. My best example of microlearning is the FAQ (frequently asked questions) structure in which there are specific questions with short answers. Likewise, in many cases, these answers are also linked to related questions or additional information. I also think that short quizzes and surveys are other tools that can be easily used to create microlearning situations. Brief audio and video material can also be used to illustrate ideas, topics and experiences that can't be easily captured by words.

4. How would the learning community be organized?

In organizing the learning community, I would return to my ideas about "roles of learners." My idea is there are a range of roles that vary by level of knowledge or ability and level of engagement. I have hypothesized five levels from novice to partner. It is worth noting that I assume that expect for the novice level, in all the other roles I assume that the participants function as both teachers and learners. In short, each person is both responsible for teaching those members at the next role below themselves and learning from the members at the next level above them. Being both teacher and learner is one of the hallmarks of what it means to be in a learning community. (See a more extensive discussion of these roles.)

Here you begin to see one of the challenges of having both parents and professionals in the same learning community. How will people feel about both parents and professionals developing learning materials? Can parents (without other credentials) obtain the role of "expert" in the learning community?

What types of technology tools are needed to support this learning community?

There needs to be an easy way to create FAQs (short question and answers), quiz tools, survey tools, audio and video tools (perhaps just the capacity to upload audio and video rather than editing tools), forums for both synchronous and asynchronous discussions, and tools for assembling short microlearning content into longer and richer learning experiences (e.g., courses, how-to segments, etc.). At the most advanced end there may need to be research tools such as data collection, management and analysis.

FAQs as Microlearning Units of Education

Despite significant advances in the use of online tools for teaching and learning, I still don't think we have conceptualized the right platform for learning online. Wikis, blogs, forums, repositories, social networks, and so on all have their place and usefulness in learning, but it is still difficult to assemble a powerful sequence of learning content and activities.

In the early stages there was much talk of "learning objects" as a basic building block of learning. Learning objects were conceptualized similar to software code objects that were designed to execute specific functions within a computer program (e.g., code for printing text) that could be used over and over again whenever that particular function was needed. A learning object was conceived as a similar unit of "learning" that could be used as needed in a teaching activity. Lots of puzzles and troubles emerged from this effort (see a summary of these problems), but gradually the idea of "learning objects" has been abandoned.

FAQs-- Frequently Asked Questions as a Learning Building Block

I think the problem is that we haven't developed the right building block for creating learning opportunities. In short, we haven't gotten the unit of production right. Yochai Benkler writes, "The number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module" (The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 4, 2006, p. 101). I would suggest that whole courses, whole lectures, etc. are too big to include very many participants. Also, materials of this magnitude serve as useful resources if you are teaching similar material, but they are rarely designed in such a way that another teacher can easily incorporate the material into their own teaching/course, etc. This lowers the actual usage of such materials. The the brilliant aspects of the Wikipedia is that they developed a system that got the "unit of production" right.

FAQs as a solution to the "unit of production" problem for learning. If we start at the basic unit of learning, I think that most learning starts with a question. Whether we are thinking about the questions of a child (How did the stars get up there?) or the scientist (How did the stars get up there?), most learning begins with a question. So what if we began to create a platform in which teachers could write questions and answers (FAQs) and then there were tools for assembling sequences of FAQs into longer sequences of learning? Would this work?

A Limited Example

In a website, MissouriFamilies, I developed some limited models of this FAQ structure. For example, here is a simple FAQ, "What is the divorce rate in the United States?" Here is a longer article that is constructed from a series of FAQs about trends in marriage rates.

My own brief efforts in trying this strategy suggests that it is possible to create a series of FAQs that can be assembled into longer learning sequences.

What about Audio/Video/PowerPoint FAQs?

Although I have not tried to create audio or video FAQs it seems to me like they would be similar to text. That is, they would be short clips that answer a question or illustrate an idea. Again they might be put together in a sequence to teach a larger point.

I am less certain about how to create a easy set of PowerPoint slides for a lecture or other type of presentation from a series of FAQs. Clearly, you couldn't just string together the words or have a series of slides that had each of the FAQs. This is an interesting question to think more about.

Other Issues in Using FAQs to Building Learning Experiences

One of the biggest challenges in using FAQs is the developing an answer that is appropriate to the level of the learner. A child's question about the stars is not the same as a physicist question about the stars even if they use the same words. There is no easy solution to this problem. To build useful systems we will have to develop ways of tagging FAQs with metadata that capture the essential "learning attributes" that need to be considered with each FAQ. This will be challenging, but perhaps less challenging that to continue to create the same content for multiple efforts to teach the same content.

There are also all types of questions. One useful way to begin to think about these questions is to use the revised Bloom taxonomy of the cognitive domain of learning. (See Forehand presentation of this work.) Often this work is used to help teachers learn how to ask questions of students to encourage them to seek deeper levels of synthesis and analysis of an issue, but these same questions can be used to build a structured set of FAQs that move from basic information about a topic to a deeper understanding. Likewise, the Bloom conceptualization can be used to build learning sequences with FAQs.

Summary

I am not ready to give up on the idea of our creating learning materials that we can use and reuse in building learning activities.

Early Learning Educational Platform-- What's Missing?

Over the last several years, Illinois has been building an educational and professional development infrastructure for child care (early learning) professionals. This project known as "Gateways to Opportunity" is designed to bring together all the resources for educating beginning and advanced professionals interested in early care and education. Additionally, there has been a long-term effort to integrate many of the resources for parents and professionals at the Illinois Early Learning Project.

These efforts have advanced the resources for parents and professionals interested in young children and have developed a wide array of useful tools-- newsletters for early learning professionals, a listserv for professionals interested in early care, descriptions of early learning standards and video examples of classrooms, teaching and work with parents, parent materials in Spanish, English and Polish, and much more. There are also many useful links to other resources on the web.

Despite all this useful material, I still feel like something is missing and there is something about the design of these websites that is lacking.

Review of the Illinois Early Learning Project Website

One difficulty is the conceptual structure of this website-- it is organized by structural features of the material rather than by the content. For example, there is a section on "videos" and "tip sheets" (which is actually a reference to the fact that these are designed as print materials). Organizing material by delivery mode is a structural characteristic of the delivery system, but not a characteristic that would be particularly important to a parent or professional who is more likely to be interested in a particular topic, issue or question. This points to another problem with these materials which is that parent and professional material is intertwined. The Illinois Early Learning Project website could easily be organized by the type of learner/client/audience so that parents could find the materials designed for them and professionals could find materials addressed to them.

Review of the Gateways to Opportunity Website

This website is better organized to address the needs of particular types of potential audiences (parents, students, current professionals, etc.) and there is a lot of useful resources located in each section, but I still have the feeling that the organizational structure reflects the resources rather than the interests or questions of the audience. For example, in the section designed for higher education faculty there are many useful links to appropriate resources, but they could be organized around the tasks or needs that higher education might be interested in such as: resources for getting approval as an entitled program, resources for professional development, resources for your students, new teaching resources, and so forth. In short, the website could be organized around the questions or concerns of the audience.

This organizational structure may result in people overlooking valuable resources. For example, the website has an extensive list of research reports listed under the section titled, Resources, but there is no link to this directly from the higher education pages. This list of research studies is likely to include a number of items that would be of interest to higher education faculty either for their own professional development or for their instruction to students.

Adding Interaction, Participation and Community

Increasing websites are incorporating opportunities for online users to interact on the website, participate in the creation of knowledge and building community. (See my general description of these topics and links to other resources about these issues.) In order to build an effective platform to education and professional development in early learning, we will have to build a platform in which there are opportunities for parents and professionals to engage with each other and with the creation of content in these online settings. This means moving beyond websites as places to find information or to tell people about the issues. This calls for a different type of design and a more open online platform.

This is the big challenge for those interested in building an effective learning platform for early learning.