Blessing and curse of crowdsourcing among educational experts - a study of teachers’ willingness to contribute as a crowd

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a new technique of gathering data or performing large scale tasks by outsourcing it to a wider public. Its role and potential in language education is investigated in first in its volume research - enetCollect (European Network for the Combination of Language Learning and Crowdsourcing Techniques) COST project. This paper presents the most pertinent data about highly successful crowdsourcing portals for language learning, some educational projects based on teacher’s contributions and analysis of a survey as a crowdsourcing activity. The paper analyses two surveys: a low response rate, large scale pan-European survey wherein a sample of language teachers od all station all over Europe was asked to answer some crowdsourcing related questions (Arhar Holdt et al., 2020) and a high response rate, small scale, survey among the distributors of the first survey in which they were asked to analyse the numbers and techniques they used to reach the crowd. The focus of this article is on an extension study to the teacher survey in which thousands of teachers were approached but the response rate was relatively low. While such low response data in other cases would have been perceived as a drawback and are rarely analyzed, in the context of crowdsourcing meta research this could be a goldmine of importance. The article demonstrates how educators mayor may not be willing to participate in a crowdsourcing activity.