Harnessing the power of the 'Massive': an innovative approach to participation, digital citizenship and open learning on-line.

In January 2015, the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) launched an innovative civic engagement project, which aimed to crowd source the United Kingdom Constitution. One of the key intentions of the project was to leverage and magnify the power of the community and the ‘massive’ in order to empower participants to engage in debate, identify solutions and come to a common agreement about the need for and the content of a UK Constitution. Involving over 1500 participants and generating tens of thousands of on-line interactions that increased as opposed to decreased over the 14 week duration of the ‘course’, Crowd Sourcing the UK Constitution challenged some of the dominant paradigms of Massive Open On-line Learning. We will present the findings arising from a critical evaluation of the project and pose a number of questions that emerged from both our engagement with the project and from the participants themselves centred on enhancing the effectiveness of a pedagogical design to harness the power of the massive, a large community of engaged participants working together in order to solve a problem, effect change or develop capacity