October 2012 Volume 15 Number 4 - Educational Technology ...

This paper presents an exploratory study to determine if a curriculum-guided crowd sourcing system for assessments
would work in the developing world context. The context of the study is presented first. Design of the study based
on models of adoption, quality of assessments, and problem posing, is presented next. This is followed by a
description of the implementation and results. A discussion follows, and the paper ends with a conclusion.
The Context
This section describes the context of the study presented in this paper; schools, teachers, the national curriculum and
textbooks. Each is discussed below.
Country, Schools Systems and Teachers
One key to the success of a crowd sourcing system is the availability and diversity of a large number of potential
contributors. The developing country chosen for this study was Pakistan which has 214,650 schools, 1,190,925
teachers and a student base of 26 million plus (Pakistan education statistics 2008-09, 2009).
Many schools in Pakistan typically do not have adequate infrastructural support like access to electricity, computers
or the Internet. Therefore, an assessment Wiki needs to ensure that alternative mechanism like the mobile phones or
physical mail is available for contributors and users. Other developing countries have similar constraints. For
example, Internet is prohibitively expensive in many developing countries (Negash, 2010) and Internet penetration is
also low (The World in 2010 - ICT Facts and Figures, 2010). According to UNESCO, 56.8% of students across the
WEI developing countries had no access to computers at all, and in India, 85% of the schools participating in the
study did not have any computers (Grisay, 2008).
Another important aspect of crowd sourcing is the quality of potential contributors. According to the World Bank,
85% of the primary teachers in Pakistan receive some type of pre-service or in-service teacher training (Trained
Teachers in Primary Education, 2012). However, there is considerable variability in the educational background of
teachers who can hold a PCT (10+1 years), CT (12+1 years), B.Ed (14+1 years), Bsc.Ed (12+3 years), or an M.Ed
degree. While little data is available for teachers in the private sector, 42% of public school teachers in Pakistan have
a CT degree while only 9.76% hold an M.Ed degree (Pakistan Education Statistics 2008-09, 2009). Hence, while a
small pool (