CrowdTeaching: Supporting Teacher Collective Intelligence Communities

The widespread availability of high-quality Web-based tools and content offers new promise and potential for supporting teachers as creators of instructional activities. When coupled with a participatory Web culture and infrastructure, teachers can share their creations as well as leverage from the best that their peers have to offer to support a collective intelligence community, dubbed CrowdTeaching. This article describes the Instructional Architect (IA), a Web-based tool that aims to support these kinds of collective intelligence processes. The IA enables teachers to design and share instructional activities (called IA projects) created around online resources. These IA projects can then be viewed, copied, and iteratively adapted by other IA users. This article describes the IA and examines how teacher usage and creation activities relate to CrowdTeaching processes.