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Brief - Imagine you are a member of a project board in a work context. You are preparing for next week’s meeting when the board will have to agree three pedagogies to invest in over the next two years.

1.Innovation Selected – Crowd Learning  

2. How to implement – by developing a Learner Management System or Virtual Learning Platform that will allow users to access the system.  On this system there will be a number of features available including:

• Chat-Rooms
• Forums
• Wikis
• Library of resources (inc videos and audio resources) – a small base of resources to get the ‘ball rolling’ but with encouragement for the community to build this resource bank themselves, with an overview and support of experts as and when required
• Useful Links to other sources of information from reputable sources
• Links to other external features such as Stake Exchange Network or Flip Boards
• Post Box for users to upload own resources to further build the library

3. Benefits and Opportunities

• Building a community of knowledge and experiences
• Addresses immediate problems
• Allows users to ask questions and access information at the time when they want to know it
• Meet standard expectation of quick and accessible information
• Makes staff independent learners who now how to gain information to keep up to date
• Combining expert and general community answers offers information in various forms to meet the needs of various recipients
• Could allow for future investment in badging achievements or ‘institutional endorsement’
• Peer assessment development
• Individuals are able to analyse their knowledge gaps (personal ownership)

Costs

• Need to invest in a Learner Management System (although there are some free Open Source systems such as moodle that could be reviewed for use)
• Requirement of staff time to a) initially create forum and b) maintain system and support community

Risks

• Need to support learners in being able to identify relevant and suitable information and distinguish from inaccurate data/information but still be able to learn from someone’s personal experiences that may clash with centrally published media.
• Potentially large sources of data will need to be managed into logical chucks to make access to information easy to find

 4. Justification on recommendation

This innovation allows for a breadth of knowledge and experience to be shared in a community that encourages life-long learning and continuous knowledge development. 

It values diversity and this offers a range of perspectives to demonstrate that sometimes there is not one answer to solve one problem but many potential paths.

It therefore challenges current theories to robustly measure its relevance and accuracy in a rapidly changing world.

This system is relatively low cost to set up but offers a huge scope for growth as the community itself takes ownership.  Additionally this innovation has a strong lead in to other innovations such as:

• Badges to accredit learning
• Seamless Learning
• Citizen Inquiry

In summary Crowd Learning offers a cost –effective and broad innovation that opens the door to other innovations once momentum and participation has grown.

Reference:

Sharples et al. (2013). Innovating Pedagogy 2013. Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Report 2 (2), p3-38.