Crowd-sourcing as a tool for content analysis of asynchronous course conversations in the mobile social networking system and Web environments

Gibran Alejandro Mendoza Garcia
International Christian University
Tokyo, Japan

Teo Hui Thian
Open University Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Roberto Bacani Figueroa Jr
University of the Philippines Open University
Los Baños, the Philippines

Crowd-sourcing, often referred to as the wisdom of the crowd, is often regarded as an acceptable resource for gathering collective concensus, which was an area previously tackled exclusively by experts. However, the legitimacy of the analyses and answers is a concern among researchers whenever this method is used.

This paper is an extension of a study that compared interactions between collaborators via mobile devices and desktop computers. It reuses the same instrument, which required a selected group of educators in the targeted field to label a series of online discussions as its primary data.

In this study, the data gathered from the online discussions is re-evaluated through a crowd-sourcing platform, using an open source system called ‘Pybossa’. The objective is to compare the results of the previous research against the data obtained from the Pybossa platform. This will help to reconfirm the primary data in the previous findings, as well as lend more credence to using crowd-sourcing as a valid tool in content analysis.