Experiences from Learnersourcing SQL Exercises: Do They Cover Course Topics and Do Students Use Them?

Abstract

Learnersourcing is an emerging phenomenon in computing education research and practice. In learnersourcing, a crowd of students participates in the creation of course resources such as exercises, written materials, educational videos, and so on. In computing education research, learnersourcing has been studied especially for the creation of multiple-choice questions and programming exercises, where prior work has suggested that learnersourcing can have multiple benefits for teachers and students alike. One result in prior studies is that when students create learnersourced content, the created content covers much of the learning objectives of the course. The present work expands on this stream of work by studying the use of a learnersourcing system in the context of teaching SQL. We study to what extent learnersourced SQL exercises cover course topics, and to what extent students complete learnersourced exercises. Our results continue the parade of previous learnersourcing studies, empirically demonstrating that learnersourced content covers instructor-specified course topics and that students indeed actively work on the learnersourced exercises. We discuss the impact of these results on teaching with learnersourcing, highlight possible explanations for our observations, and outline directions for future research on learnersourcing.