Comparing crowdworkers’ and conventional knowledge workers’ self-regulated learning strategies in the workplace

Abstract

This paper compares the strategies used by crowdworkers and conventional knowledge workers to self-regulate their learning in the workplace. Crowdworkers are a self-employed, radically distributed workforce operating outside conventional organisational settings; they have no access to the sorts of training, professional development and incidental learning opportunities that workers in conventional workplaces typically do. The paper explores what differences there are between crowdworkers and conventional knowledge workers in terms of self-regulated learning strategies they undertake. Data were drawn from four datasets using the same survey instrument. Respondents included crowdworkers from CrowdFlower and Upwork platforms and conventional knowledge workers in the finance, education and healthcare sectors. The results show that the majority of crowdworkers and conventional knowledge workers used a wide range of SRL strategies. Among 20 strategies explored, a statistically significant difference was uncovered in the use of only one strategy. Specifically, crowdworkers were significantly less likely than the conventional workers to articulate plans of how to achieve their learning goals. The results suggest that, despite working outside organisational structures, crowdworkers are similar to conventional workers in terms of how they self-regulate their workplace learning. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings and proposing directions for future research.

Workplace learning in crowdwork

“…More specifically, the findings suggest that microworkers as well as online freelancers undertake a variety of WLAs out of their own volition, as evidenced by considerable majorities among both sub-samples reporting regular use of these activities in their crowdwork. This is similar to recent findings from employee samples within conventional knowledge work settings (Littlejohn et al , 2011; Margaryan, 2018). Furthermore, both types of crowdworkers in this sample appear to be highly self-efficacious, reflective and intrinsically motivated.…”

The Life Course: An interdisciplinary framework for broadening the scope of research on crowdwork

“…In survey studies, most samples ranged from 460 to 12000 respondents; and one particularly large sample had 40,000 respondents collected over 28 months (Difallah et al, 2018). The smallest samples among survey studies had 110, 113 and 203 participants respectively (Fieseler et al, 2019;Kost et al, 2018;Margaryan, 2019b).…”

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“…• Crowdwork experiences of workers with disabilities and their perceptions of platform accessibility (Vashistha et al, 2018;Zyskowski et al, 2015) • Workers' motivation to participate in crowdwork, to self-organise, network and collaborate with other workers (Gray et al, 2016;Mubarak et al, 2016;Posch et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2017) • Workers' experiences and perceptions of skill development, skill requirements, competencies and employability (Barnes et al, 2015;Bucher & Fieseler, 2016;Feldman et al, 2017;Gadiraju et al, 2016;Rani & Furrer, 2019) • Workers' on-the-job learning practices and self-regulatory learning behaviours (Margaryan, 2019a(Margaryan, , 2019b) • Workers' views on key actors in the platforms (Al-Ani & Stumpp, 2016) • Workers' personal factors and values impacting crowdwork (Gould et al, 2016;Kingsley et al, 2015;Law et al, 2016;Majima et al, 2017) • Workers' behaviours and experiences in adapting to and enacting platforms' workflows, including procrastination or trustworthiness (Gadiraju, 2015;Gadiraju et al, 2015;Gould et al, 2016;Jiang et al, 2015;Lehdonvirta, 2018;Martin et al, 2016;Retelny et al, 2017) • Workers' and clients' use of platform features (Sodré & Brasileiro, 2017) • Workers' perceptions of (dis)advantages of crowdwork (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2016;Deng & Joshi, 2016;Fieseler et al, 2019) • Tool development by workers to address systems constraints (Lehdonvirta, 2018) • Workers' perceptions of meaningfulness of crowdwork and types of meanings ascribed (Bucher et al, 2019;Kost et al, 2018) Linked Lives • Networks, collaborations, self-organisation ...…”

“…Agency refers to the skills, motives and goals an individual brings to the picture. To assess levels of agency, for example, a survey could reveal the crowdworkers' self-regulatory strategies and self-efficacy beliefs (Fontana et al, 2015;Margaryan, 2019aMargaryan, , 2019b, and, when combined with interview with workers, could provide examples and details of these beliefs and their behavioural manifestations. Mixedmethod designs blending interviews, surveys, inductive analysis of crowdworkers' biographic descriptions and inductive analyses of their online interactions and activities could help us understand some key factors which, moving forward, would be central to advancing our understanding of crowd workplaces.…”