1. 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.

2. 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

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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)

11. 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

12. 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

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

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

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

16. 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

17. Thank you
Merci
Muito obrigado
Asante