The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe, a former contributing editor to Wired magazine, in his June 2006 article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” This article begins by detailing the experience of a project director who, in her search for photographs, ultimately bypassed a professional photographer in favor of a stock photo website featuring the work of hundreds of amateurs that provided significantly lower costs and a lot more options. Howe uses this anecdote to showcase the wider trends of crowdsourcing that have only grown in the last decade. In the article, he goes on to tie this instance in to the larger phenomenon of the rise of technology:

"Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.”

Howe is now considered a leading authority on how crowdsourcing is changing the world, and particularly business. In the following video, he attributes this massive change not just to technology alone, but to what he calls “virtual crowds”:

These virtual crowds have contributed to the success of some of the best-known websites and companies of the last several years, such as Wikipedia (for knowledge aggregation), Netflix (for entertainment targeting), and Amazon (for human intelligence tasks). How do these companies implement crowdsourcing? See my homemade infographic below:

Ultimately, the main definitions of crowdsourcing revolve around it changing the world of business, so the question is: how does it fit into education? As many of us who are educators have seen, or perhaps have even done, teachers tend to use their peers to get advice, suggestions on course materials, or feedback on assignments or syllabi. However, with the rise of technology, educators are better able to do this online with a much wider virtual crowd of peers. With technology, we are not limited to our smaller, physical community to try to generate new ideas; technology allows us to literally ask anyone about anything, but we can also seek out experts in very specific online domains, such as Teachers.Net, Pro Teacher, and AtoZTeacherStuff. These forums serve as a meeting point for the virtual crowd and provide a user with recursive feedback when they submit and resubmit their ideas for consideration.

Teachers can also benefit from crowdsourcing when generating content for their classes. Companies such as IXL Learning utilize the “wisdom of crowds” to find knowledge and facts that can then be used to help teachers build online games that fit their students’ educational needs. This kind of crowdsourcing uses collaborative intelligence to save the teacher valuable time and to provide more in-depth content than they could create on their own.

Crowdsourcing is also tackling the problem of a lack of quality education in poor communities around the world. When resources and even teachers are limited, technology—and the people who use it—can step in and provide support. As you will see in the video below, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) utilized crowdsourcing to find the best ideas for using mobile technology in the classroom to achieve six particular education goals. This is an effort that would have been next to impossible only a decade ago as it would have taken too long and required a workforce of thousands to compile as many ideas.

As Professor Cope mentioned in his video on social learning, all information gained online is a social inheritance. If we think about crowdsourcing in this way, it is a highly valuable inheritance because it not only creates results that are specific to our needs, but builds more and better results through the wisdom of crowds.