ExPeerience: Towards AI-Assisted Learnersourcing to Bridge Conceptual Understanding and Problem Solving in Database Programming Education
Authors
Learnersourcing, an educational approach that positions students as active contributors rather than passive consumers, offers a scalable approach to co-creating instructional resources while engaging students in authentic problem-solving. However, it faces a fundamental tension: effective ``learning'' requires scaffolding that minimizes extraneous cognitive load and focuses attention on reasoning, while effective ``sourcing'' requires structure, completeness, and standardization to ensure student-generated content can be reused. These competing goals create a tradeoff: students either learn but produce content that is difficult to reuse, or generate usable resources but receive limited learning benefit. We propose a new AI-assisted learnersourcing paradigm to address this tension. By assigning collaborative roles to both learners and AI, the approach enables students to focus on cognitively meaningful sub-tasks that foster ``learning'', while large language models (LLMs) handle mechanical and procedural sub-tasks for ``sourcing''. Guided by user-centered design principles, we implement this workflow in ExPeerience, a system that scaffolds students in co-creating contextualized worked-out examples for database programming. Within ExPeerience, the AI serves as a collaborator for ideation, a co-creator of artifacts, and an evaluator of students' inputs. Our evaluation with 24 participants showed that structuring AI into distinct collaborative roles improves learning engagement while producing high-quality student-generated content. Compared to a baseline using the Gemini chatbot, ExPeerience users created SQL problems in more diverse and personally meaningful contexts. They actively evaluated, edited, and refined AI-generated components, and most authored their own SQL solutions, whereas baseline participants largely accepted AI outputs without modification and did not attempt to solve the problem. Overall, ExPeerience produced more contextualized, varied, and thoughtfully constructed worked-out examples. These findings demonstrate the potential of AI-assisted learnersourcing as a paradigm to balance learning and sourcing goals. We also draw design implications for future AI-assisted learnersourcing systems that aim to produce reusable, high-quality learner-generated content while promoting educational value.
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