Crowdteaching: Online Crowdsourcing in Education

Web 2.0 technologies have generated massive new opportunities for teachers to collaborate and to improve as professionals. “Crowdteaching” refers to a group of teachers who collaborate online for the purpose of professional improvement (Recker, Yuan, & Ye, 2014). While much literature discusses offline communities of practice among teachers, and additional literature discusses how students use online learning, there is a gap in literature about online professional improvement practices among teachers. This paper discusses distributed cognition as a theoretical basis for crowdteaching; how teachers currently use crowdteaching; and how crowdteaching can be optimized in order to promote professional improvement. Methods included studying three databases to establish an initial repository, data mining relevant studies for additional resources, collaborating with colleagues, and revisiting databases using a new set of terms that emerged. Teachers currently use crowdteaching to communicate both informally and formally for information as well as emotional support; and to gather, develop, and share information and resources (Booth, 2012; Brooks & Gibson, 2012; Dron & Anderson, 2014; Marrero, Woodruff, Schuster, & Riccio, 2010). The greatest problem that traversed nearly all literature was the need for curating quality resources (Grote-Garcia and Vasinda, 2014; Irvine, 2015; Recker, Yuan, & Ye, 2014). Extensive amounts of professional resources, coupled with increasing attempts to curate the highest quality work, begets a hopeful future for crowdteaching as a means for improving teachers’ professional practice.