Cross-cultural crowdsourcing: A method for sharing OERs across language barriers Griff Richards, PhD Manager Educational Technology & Learning Resources African Virtual University AVU Conference, 22 November 2013, Nairobi, Kenya Except where otherwise noted, this work is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The Need AVU supports post-secondary education in Africa in three languages: English, French, & Portuguese. In Phase I of AVU multinational project 73 modules were professionally translated to be available in all 3 languages. Very expensive Very slow Translations missed nuances of scientific jargon

We need to find a better way to translate AVU documents!

I we can find a good solution then people will support the innovation. B

Collaborative Writing? Wikipedia is curates by about 1% of the people who use it. These volunteers manage pages, guard against vandalism, and create content. If we could get 1% of the AVU materials users to help with translations then maybe we could get better, faster translations.

Could we use a wiki community? PRO lots of people bring lots of expertise Writers and reviewers and translators CON Quality assurance standards required How to coordinate/ direct efforts where needed Translation can be complex and needs workflows to keep track of progress and problems

Crowdsourcing The recruitment and coordination of piece-meal work across the internet to achieve a goal. Speeds up content creation Gets clients and collaborators involved Gets target audience involved Offers diversity and creative choice Drives development of scalable processes (Bratvold, 2012)

Wisdom of Crowds (Surowicki, 2004) Diversity – a group will bring more points of views and make better informed decisions Independence – people’s opinions less impacted by others in the group Decentralization – not a central power structure Aggregation – many hands make light work

Issues Recruiting the right people Micro-tasking Strategic Management Subject matter expertise Knowledge of the language People who care about getting it right Micro-tasking Division of jobs into “do-able” tasks Redundancy to check each others work Strategic Management Build community Build capacity in a sustainable way

Previous efforts OOPS – Lucifer Chu. MIT OKI -> Mandarin Chinese MERLOT – Peer review of lessons LORI/ Elera – Peer review of learning objects

Better Examples Wikieducator – building curriculum Siyavula – translating open textbooks K-12 UMichigan – translating video captions

Success = Build a sustainable community of practice. Quality Capability Sustainability Recognition beyond thanks Expansion to other language groups

Next Steps for AVU Talk with others who are working on this already Create and Prototype technical structures Enable others to use our processes to expand the communities served Add analytics to highlight issues and to recognize the contributors Look for other ways of using crowdsourcing to build and maintain curriculua

Thank you Merci Muito obrigado Asante