Charting the Design and Analytics Agenda of Learnersourcing Systems

Learnersourcing is emerging as a viable learner-centred and pedagogically justified approach for harnessing the creativity and evaluation power of learners as experts-in-training. Despite the increasing adoption of learnersourcing in higher education, understanding students’ behaviour while engaged in learnersourcing and best practices for the design and development of learnersourcing systems are still largely under-researched. This paper offers data-driven reflections and lessons learned from the development and deployment of a learnersourcing adaptive educational system called RiPPLE, which to date, has been used in more than 50-course offerings with over 12,000 students. Our reflections are categorised into examples and best practices on (1) assessing the quality of students’ contributions using accurate, explainable and fair approaches to data analysis, (2) incentivising students to develop high-quality contributions and (3) empowering instructors with actionable and explainable insights to guide student learning. We discuss the implications of these findings and how they may contribute to the growing literature on the development of effective learnersourcing systems and more broadly technological educational solutions that support learner-centred learning at scale.