Abstract
Student participation in school decision-making has long been promoted in educational research, yet its implementation remains limited and sometimes symbolic. Educational crowdsourcing, supported by digital participation platforms, offers new opportunities to operationalise student voice through structured processes of contribution submissions (e.g., ideas), deliberation and voting. We explore this phenomenon in the context of aula, a platform adopted in several German schools to enable students to engage in decision-making while learning democratic competencies. Drawing on 11 interviews including teachers from seven schools and a survey of 57 students from one school who utilise aula, we developed a conceptual model of educational crowdsourcing in schools and identified success and failure factors shaping the adoption and sustainability of the concept. Our findings contribute to theory by positioning digital participation platforms as socio-technical learning environments and to practice through design recommendations for integrating such learning approaches into school routines and curricula.
Recommended Citation
Leible, Stephan; Mayer, Christian; Kučević, Emir; Dannat, Sören; Schlegelmilch, Tobias; and Ludzay, Max, "Exploring Educational Crowdsourcing in Schools: Digital
Participation Platforms for Hands-On Learning of Democratic
Competencies" (2025). ACIS 2025 Proceedings. 297.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2025/297