Machin, Jane E The Class is the Crowd Exploring the Potential of Crowdsourcing in Large Classes. 2022. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.
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Abstract
Class sizes in higher education are increasing, with students today spending over 40% of their time in large classes, that is, those with over 40 students. While larger classes help university administrators balance growing enrollments with concurrent decreases in funding, they come at the cost of student academic achievement, satisfaction, and retention. Teaching practices such as collaborative and project-based learning are seen as too unwieldy to implement in large classes, and are sacrificed in favor of more manageable, but less successful, pedagogy, such as lectures and multiple-choice tests. In this thesis, I propose that the large number of students in a mass class represent a crowd and outside of academia, crowds are not evils endured because of resource limitations; they are valued as intelligent forces that can achieve positive societal change and business growth. Drawing on industry crowdsourcing best practice, I designed, implemented and tested a novel project that embraced, rather than struggled against, the vast quantity of students in a mass class. Moving between individual and collaborative phases, the so-called Crowd Project captured the wisdom of the crowd, while holding students accountable for their personal contribution. Using a quasi-experimental design, 81 students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Students in the Crowd Project shared findings from individual assignments with the entire class while students in a modified Group Project just shared their findings with their immediate group members. Results indicate that students in the Crowd Project were more engaged, performed better on course and module learning objectives, had higher grades and developed more creative solutions, compared to students the modified Group Project. Faculty involvement, however, was greater in the Crowd Project. A second quasi-experiment compared the Crowd Project to a Group+ Project, which aimed to equalize the degree of faculty involvement between conditions. Results find no significant difference between the Crowd and Group+ Project design, suggesting that faculty involvement is central to student success.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | design thinking, crowdsourcing, group project, pedagogy, large classes |
| Subjects: | L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration |
| Divisions: | Radford University > College of Visual and Performing Arts > Department of Design |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Jul 2022 20:09 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Apr 2023 19:05 |
| URI: | http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/802 |
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