Crowdsourced Peer Learning Activity for Internet of Things Education: A Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a crowdsourced peer learning platform called OLYMPUS designed to improve IoT education, validated through user studies showing enhanced understanding of IoT products and design decisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online platform and method for crowdsourced peer learning specifically tailored for IoT education, addressing the knowledge gap among end users.

Findings

The platform enables deeper understanding of IoT products.

User studies show improved learning outcomes.

The open-source tool is available for community use.

Abstract

Computing devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones have become part of our daily lives. End users increasingly know more and more information about these devices. Further, more technically savvy end users know how such devices are being built and know how to choose one over the others. However, we cannot say the same about the Internet of Things (IoT) products. Due to its infancy nature of the marketplace, end users have very little idea about IoT products. To address this issue, we developed a method, a crowdsourced peer learning activity, supported by an online platform (OLYMPUS) to enable a group of learners to learn IoT products space better. We conducted two different user studies to validate that our tool enables better IoT education. Our method guide learners to think more deeply about IoT products and their design decisions. The learning platform we developed is open source and available for the community.