Utilizing crowdsourcing and machine learning in education: Literature review

For many years, learning continues to be a vital developing field since it is the key measure of the world’s civilization and evolution with its enormous effect on both individuals and societies. Enhancing existing learning activities in general will have a significant impact on literacy rates around the world. One of the crucial activities in education is the assessment method because it is the primary way used to evaluate the student during their studies. The main purpose of this review is to examine the existing learning and e-learning approaches that use either crowdsourcing, machine learning, or both crowdsourcing and machine learning in their proposed solutions. This review will also investigate the addressed applications to identify the existing researches related to the assessment. Identifying all existing applications will assist in finding the unexplored gaps and limitations. This study presents a systematic literature review investigating 30 papers from the following databases: IEEE and ACM Digital Library. After performing the analysis, we found that crowdsourcing is utilized in 47.8% of the investigated learning activities, while each of the machine learning and the hybrid solutions are utilized in 26% of the investigated learning activities. Furthermore, all the existing approaches regarding the exam assessment problem that are using machine learning or crowdsourcing were identified. Some of the existing assessment systems are using the crowdsourcing approach and other systems are using the machine learning, however, none of the approaches provide a hybrid assessment system that uses both crowdsourcing and machine learning. Finally, it is found that using either crowdsourcing or machine learning in the online courses will enhance the interactions between the students. It is concluded that the current learning activities need to be enhanced since it is directly affecting the student’s performance. Moreover, merging both the machine learning to the crowd wisdom will increase the accuracy and the efficiency of education.