Harnessing crowdvoting to support students' creativity

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has become an emerging topic in research and practice in the previous years. Numerous research and case studies have discussed crowdsourcing models, benefits and constraints. In addition, many researchers investigated the potentials of the crowdsourcing models as a support to creative processes. However, there has still not been much research related to crowdsourcing in educational environments. In this paper we present an approach to harnessing the potentials of crowd voting through a social network as a support to students' creative projects. The goal of the research was to design and evaluate a model for motivating students' creativity through a crowd voted competition on a social network. The experiment was conducted at the Department of E-business, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade. Students were assigned a project in 3D modelling and animation. The task was to design a promotional animation that could support the defined marketing activities. The ten best projects were selected by teachers, and posted on a Facebook page for opened crowd voting. Results of the research show that students generally had positive attitudes toward this type of activities. They were motivated to create original projects, as well as to promote their work. Finally, we analyze if students' creativity styles were related to their attitudes and performance.