Learnersourcing of Complex Assessments

Abstract

We present results from a pilot study where students successfully created complex assessments for a MOOC in introductory electronics -- an area with a very large expert-novice gap. Previous work in learnersourcing found that learners can productively contribute through simple tasks. However, many course resources require a high level of expertise to create, and prior work fell short on tasks with a large expert-novice gap, such as textbook creation or concept tagging. Since these constitute a substantial portion of course creation costs, addressing this issue is prerequisite to substantially shifting MOOC economics through learnersourcing. This represents one of the first successes in learnersourcing with a large expert-novice gap. In the pilot, we reached out to 206 students (out of thousands who met eligibility criteria) who contributed 14 complex high-quality design problems. This results suggests a full cohort could contribute hundreds of problems. We achieved this through a four-pronged approach: (1) pre-selecting top learners (2) community feedback process (3) student mini-course in pedagogy (4) instructor review and involvement.