A Study of the Impact of a Crowd Wisdom Online Learning Community Platform on Student Learning

The use of collective intelligence applications in educational settings has been reported in the literature for almost two decades. These collective intelligence applications aggregate individual knowledge via different synchronous and asynchronous mode of communications and Web 2.0 applications which support learning, communication and collaboration activities, and create “Wisdom of the Crowds”. Crowdsourcing further extends these collective intelligence processes in a distributed and crossorganizational way. This paper evaluates the effects and impacts of crowd wisdom applications on a peer assisted learning support service titled Peer-Assisted Learning scheme using Supplemental Instruction (PALSI) in a higher education institution in Hong Kong. Adopting the Design Science approach, an Online Learning Community (OLC) platform was developed tap on the Wisdom of Crowds and its effectiveness on student learning was evaluated. The OLC platform is not designed to replace existing face-to-face PALSI learning sessions and activities. Rather it helps to provide an additional online platform for supplementing and facilitating interaction between student mentors and mentees and among student mentees as well. The OLC platform is designed in a way that supports indexed and search functions who join the PALSI scheme, and it can also be archived as a repository for future reference by similar courses. Empirical analysis was carried out to evaluate the relationship between user participation and assessment results. Statistics show that students who made use of the OLC platform obtained better grades.