The future of Education is in Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence can roughly be referred to as the knowledge that emerges together in a group, which can be utilized more intelligently/perceptively than any one person individually. Collective intelligence intensely adds to the transference of knowledge and power from an individual to a group. Open-source intelligence will sooner or later create superior results to knowledge developed by proprietary software established within businesses. Many professors use a jar of jelly beans as an example: and enquiring learners to guess the total number of beans in the pot, and average their responses as opposed to any individual persons’ answer. Consistently, the average is observed to be more accurate than any answer from an individual. The notion is used in computer science, psychology, social science, and business. However, higher education has been sluggish in implementing collective intelligence in the classroom.

Benefits of Collective Intelligence in Education

Crowdsourcing enables students to engage more proactively in the process of education. Students can take ownership of their education and process of learning by collaboration and competition of several individuals. In this environment, students are provided the opportunity to discuss, collaborate, and develop something as a collective piece and are given the chance to learn critical thinking skills, and promote research activities. Therefore, collective intelligence is imperative for democratization, since it is interwoven with knowledge-based values and sustained by collective knowledge sharing, and hence contributes to an improved understanding of diverse communities. The application of collective intelligence in education includes elicitation of point estimates, aggregation of opinion, and collection of data, market judgment, and predictions in technology.

Why is it important for instructors?

Knowing the process of collecting and synthesizing data from interconnecting sources as included in collective intelligence is progressively a critical skill for functioning in a modern workplace where analytics and handling data have become a norm. Making this concept more typical in the classroom can equip students with the requisite skills that are required in the workplace, and help enhance critical thinking skills on the whole. For example, instructors can create groups and assign a particular piece of research to each person. The various pieces of information are integrated into collective research. After the students have done their research, students would be able to share the information they have researched and found out, with one another. This is how students can share and develop their projects collaboratively and collective intelligence can be used in instructional strategies and classrooms.

Modern ways of capturing collective intelligence

Crowdsource opinions/ideas

Flash cast is an effective application developed for classrooms that can help instructors to gather collective intelligence. Flash cast can permit one to crowdsource opinions/ideas in the form of probabilistic estimations (0-100% likelihood) on any particular question that has a confirmable result. Once a question is posted, responses are submitted on phones/laptops of students in real-time to create a consensus response/prediction. In this situation, students can immediately compare the estimations submitted by students of a class, and start to analyse how the collective data can vary from their individual opinion.

Engage learners in online learning communities

Taking a clue from social media platforms, educationalists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application for students known as Classroom Salon that can engage learners in online learning communities and can effectually tap the collective intelligence of a set of students.

Social Interaction for development of learners

Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Platforms for instance Facebook and Twitter have caught the attention of young folks in a way that online discussion forums, webinars, and blogs have not. Therefore, with Classroom Salon, educators have tried to gain the sense of association that makes social media sites so likable, but within a structure that that permits groups to analyse texts profoundly. Therefore, this is not just social interaction for the sake of entertaining but a process of enhancing the experience of learners.