LAUSR

With the continuing increase in the use of online distributed learning environments, crowdsourcing of educational research efforts is becoming more important. Crowdsourcing refers to the activity of outsourcing a task to a large, undefined “crowd,” rather than to a designated “agent” (an organization, informal or formal team, or individuals (Howe, 2006, 2008; Jeppesen & Lakhani, 2010). Several organizations have utilized online crowdsourcing systems to gather creative ideas for new products and services and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving from a large, dispersed “crowd” of nonexperts (e.g. consumers) (Afuah & Tucci, 2012; Bayus, 2013; Poetz & Schreier, 2012). Relevant cases include Dell’s IdeaStorm Community, “LED – Emotionalize your light” competition supported by OSRAM and Siemens, and Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea Community (Bayus, 2013). Therefore, crowdsourcing has gained considerable attention from practitioners and academics. However, most of crowdsourcing works focus mainly on business purposes (e.g. Afuah & Tucci, 2012; Bayus, 2013; Poetz & Schreier, 2012) and system mechanisms (e.g. Gao, Liu, Ooi, Wang, & Chen, 2013; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013; Welinder & Perona, 2010; Xie, Lui, & Towsley, 2015). Our knowledge about educational use of online crowdsourcing is still far from complete. With the development of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies, crowdsourcing has become a key aspect of the development of open online learning platforms (Corneli & Mikroyannidis, 2012). Corneli and Mikroyannidis (2012) extracted general recommendations for building online communities and applying crowdsourcing techniques in educational contexts by analyzing two cases and encouraging future studies to explore the issue of crowdsourcing education on the web. Despite the urge, there is a lack of empirical studies and theoretical knowledge constructions about educational use of online crowdsourcing. The concept of crowdsourcing can have a great impact on educational technology applications because it introduces an innovative educational system development approach by outsourcing works to a large number of external system developers or individuals. Crowdsourcing may become a new paradigm of educational technology development over the next few years. Therefore, there is a need for practitioners and academics to further explore the innovative use of crowdsourcing in education. This special issue calls for submissions of state-of-the-art research articles providing new theoretical and practical insights into the innovative use of crowdsourcing in education. The list of possible topics includes, but not limited to: