Professor Uses Wisdom of Crowds to Engage Students

Not sure about you, but I personally found astronomy a bit challenging back in my college days.  For me it wasn’t challenging because it was a hard topic necessarily; mostly because it was a topic where I was not particularly interested.

I bring this up because a good friend of mine was telling me that his daughter takes an astronomy class that uses the wisdom of the crowd to keep students engaged.  I have always known that crowdsourcing will play a part in the education process, both formally and informally.  Using the wisdom of crowds to keep college students engaged is intriguing, to say the least.

The professor of this class created wireless voting consoles with four simple buttons labeled A, B, C, and D, placed at each seat.  Periodically during the class lecture, the professor poses a question and asks the students to vote on the right answer.  What they found is that “the crowd” (the students in this case) are right more than 80% of the time when polled.  My friend’s daughter has found that it actually keeps the students much more engaged and interested in the topic.  

This concept is very similar to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, where the contestant has three different lifelines to try and determine the answer to a question.  One of these lifelines is to poll the audience for their opinion to the answer; the audience is right 91% of the time.   In contrast, another lifeline available to the contestant is to call a friend, a claimed “expert”, to assist with the answer of a question.  In these cases, the expert is only correct 65% of the time.

Despite the possibility that the majority of these students will not move on to be astronomers, could the learning technique be a new way of teaching some subjects?  Might it be sufficient in entry-level elective classes, such as astronomy, for a professor to get the “wisdom of the crowd” of a class to about 80% and not push for “experts”?

As I like to push my thinking outside of the box, I can’t help but wonder what the outcome would be if more classes were to engage in teaching practices embraced by this astronomy professor.   Would we create more experts, if this practice of teaching was also complemented with a grading system that focused on the collective wisdom of the entire class as opposed to the traditional individual grading system?

I think that what this professor has done is really revolutionary, and it is clear to me that we have not even begun to leverage the wisdom of crowds yet.

The Crowd is gathering…….