Combining Crowdsourcing and Learning to Improve Engagement and Performance

original improved Figure 1. LevelUp for Photoshop is a crowdsourcing platform that combines learning and creative work. Workers learn photo editing skills, while improving real-world images. Interactive step-by-step tutorials teach workers new techniques and Challenge Rounds filled with images from different requester organizations test worker knowledge. The worker interface is shown on the left; several original and improved images are shown on the right. Crowdsourcing complex creative tasks remains difficult, in part because these tasks require skilled workers. Most crowd-sourcing platforms do not help workers acquire the skills nec essary to accomplish complex creative tasks. In this paper, we describe a platform that combines learning and crowdsourc ing to benefit both the workers and the requesters. Workers gain new skills through interactive step-by-step tutorials and test their knowledge by improving real-world images submit ted by requesters. In a series of three deployments spanning two years, we varied the design of our platform to enhance the learning experience and improve the quality of the crowd work. We tested our approach in the context of LevelUp for Photoshop, which teaches people how to do basic photograph improvement tasks using Adobe Photoshop. We found that by using our system workers gained new skills and produced high-quality edits for requested images, even if they had little prior experience editing images