A Review of the Uses of Crowdsourcing in Higher Education

Teaching, learning, and research in higher education institutions nowadays do not stop at the boundaries of campus and classroom any more due to the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies that facilitates social online interactivity and collaboration between people around the world. This paper explores at how crowdsourcing, one of the key elements in Web 2.0, has been practiced at the present time in various activities of higher education institutions through several projects that can be categorized into four primary strategies of crowdsourcing: crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd funding, and crowd voting. Uses of crowdsourcing can keep higher education institutions forefront of education and research innovation, and prepare members in these institutions including students, staff, researchers, lecturers and administration for the online world challenges.