TRIZ Guidelines for Innovating E-Learning Environments with Respect to Prosuming

Introduction

Prosuming in the digital world, or equivalently, produsing happens when a community of practice or interest engages in co-creating information, knowledge, artifacts, or services. Communities are then producing for their own consumption or usage. The prosumer concept can be easily understood in the field of digital activities and products. Among these are:

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  Activities of the open source community where users are producing and sharing software expected to fit and satisfy their needs.

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  Activities occurring in the Web 2.0 where active Internet users are:

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    Producing and consuming various media-based information, knowledge and ideas.

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    Customizing different services they use by assembling various artifacts.

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    Designing and sharing applications as it happens for example in some service providers’ discussion boards where much can be learned, suggested, and shared.

Depending on its nature, quality, and context, the information or the digital artifact which are produced might contribute to knowledge construction and learning. Different producer-consumer roles with respect to the product might be distinguished. The consumer might embrace the producer role either by producing elements of the final product or by expressing voluntarily or not to the producer ideas on how to improve the product. Sometimes prosuming happens to be sneaky like when Internet users’ searches and traces are used for search engine algorithm improving or for targeted advertising. TRIZ is a problem solving method that helps innovating and overcoming identified difficulties by considering 40 design principles. TRIZ applications extended to non-technical areas, for example education (Marsh, Waters, & Marsh, 2002). This chapter aims to take advantage of this approach to consider the most significant features required for an e-learning platform to favor learners’ creation and co-creation that are useful for learning.

E-Learning Prosuming

Today, information technologies allow consumers to collaborate with companies and other consumers to co-create and produce things of value, for example by proposing and voting for things that they would like to see produced (Walker 2007). This represents a fundamental change in the economic organization as long as the value produced is an “exchange value” by opposition to “use value” (Humphreys & Grayson 2008). Similarly, a fundamental change is happening in the e-learning organization. Learners are producing “use value” when they build and customize their personal platform. They are producing “exchange value” when their creation within the global platform in the form of content or artifact benefits some members of the learners and teachers community. This chapter explores the prosumer concept in the e-learning area. Therefore, we distinguish two types for the product of interest, digital products and, knowledge or competence products. Digital products include all software and network resources that shape a given e-learning platform. Knowledge products refer to the intelligent content of any media type that contributes to the learning process.