Cross-cultural crowdsourcing:A method for sharing OERs across

language barriersGriff Richards, PhD

Manager Educational Technology & Learning Resources

African Virtual UniversityAVU 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!

A B

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

A 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.

1.Speeds up content creation2.Gets clients and collaborators involved3.Gets target audience involved4.Offers diversity and creative choice5.Drives development of scalable processes

(Bratvold, 2012)

Wisdom of Crowds(Surowicki, 2004)

1. Diversity – a group will bring more points of views and make better informed decisions

2. Independence – people’s opinions less impacted by others in the group

3. Decentralization – not a central power structure

4. Aggregation – many hands make light work

Issues• Recruiting the right people– 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

1. Talk with others who are working on this already

2. Create and Prototype technical structures3. Enable others to use our processes to expand

the communities served4. Add analytics to highlight issues and to

recognize the contributors5. Look for other ways of using crowdsourcing

to build and maintain curriculua

• Thank you• Merci• Muito obrigado• Asante