Crowdsourced Peer Learning Activity for Internet of Things Education: A Case Study
This addresses the issue of IoT education for end users and learners, but it is incremental as it applies existing crowdsourced learning methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of limited end-user understanding of IoT products by developing a crowdsourced peer learning activity supported by an online platform, which was validated through user studies to enable better IoT education by guiding learners to think more deeply about IoT products and design decisions.
Computing devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones have become part of our daily lives. End users increasingly know more and more information about these devices. Further, more technically savvy end users know how such devices are being built and know how to choose one over the others. However, we cannot say the same about the Internet of Things (IoT) products. Due to its infancy nature of the marketplace, end users have very little idea about IoT products. To address this issue, we developed a method, a crowdsourced peer learning activity, supported by an online platform (OLYMPUS) to enable a group of learners to learn IoT products space better. We conducted two different user studies to validate that our tool enables better IoT education. Our method guide learners to think more deeply about IoT products and their design decisions. The learning platform we developed is open source and available for the community.