MOOCs and Crowdsourcing: Massive Courses and Massive Resources

TL;DR

This paper compares MOOCs and crowdsourcing, highlighting their shared characteristics such as IT mediation and large-scale participation, and discusses implications for future research and practice.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes similarities between MOOCs and crowdsourcing, providing new insights into their common traits and suggesting future research directions.

Findings

Shared IT structures and knowledge generation capabilities

Presence of intermediary service providers in both domains

Techniques to attract and maintain participant activity

Abstract

Premised upon the observation that MOOC and crowdsourcing phenomena share several important characteristics, including IT mediation, large-scale human participation, and varying levels of openness to participants, this work systematizes a comparison of MOOC and crowdsourcing phenomena along these salient dimensions. In doing so, we learn that both domains share further common traits, including similarities in IT structures, knowledge generating capabilities, presence of intermediary service providers, and techniques designed to attract and maintain participant activity. Stemming directly from this analysis, we discuss new directions for future research in both fields and draw out actionable implications for practitioners and researchers in both domains.