Communications of the ACM
Engaging Online Crowds in the Classroom Could Be Important Tool For Teaching Innovation
A pilot study on online crowds discussed at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013) found that social media and other crowdsourcing sites can be very useful to students.
Credit: BusinessGrow
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Northwestern University have presented the findings from a pilot study on online crowds at CHI 2013, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Paris. Input from social media and other crowdsourcing sites can help students identify human needs for products or services, generate large quantities of ideas, and ease some aspects of testing those ideas.
Finding ways to incorporate online crowds into coursework is critical for teaching the process of innovation, says professor Steven Dow in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "Social networks and other online crowds can provide input that students can't get otherwise," he notes.
Along with Northwestern professor Elizabeth Gerber, Dow has set up a website to share ideas and resources on using online crowds in innovation education. "The Internet affords access to online communities to which we might not ever have access," Gerber says. "Future innovators need to know how to find and respectively engage with these communities to get the resources they need."
From Carnegie Mellon University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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