New research suggests that there are fundamental similarities between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and crowdsourcing phenomena. While MOOCs have been researched primarily in the context of education, and crowdsourcing has been looked at in the context of IT, the two fields share characteristics such as “large scale participation, IT mediation, knowledge generating capabilities, presence of intermediary service providers, and techniques designed to attract and maintain participant activity.” The findings propose new directions for future research in both domains and suggests that each field can learn from the other.
http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6143/5170