M.Sc. Nea Pirttinen defends her PhD thesis "Learnersourcing in Computing Education: Exploring Student Engagement and Artefact Quality" on Wednesday the 1st of April 2026 at 13 in the University of Helsinki Athena building, Auditorium 107 (Siltavuorenpenger 3 A, 1st floor). Her opponent is Assistant Professor Toni Taipalus (University of Tampere) and custos Professor Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki). The defence will be held in Finnish.
The thesis of Nea Pirttinen is a part of research done in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. Her supervisors have been Assistant Professor Juho Leinonen (Aalto University), Senior University Lecturer Arto Hellas (Aalto University), Professor Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki) and Professor Tommi Mikkonen (University of Jyväskylä).
Learnersourcing in Computing Education: Exploring Student Engagement and Artefact Quality
Learnersourcing, that is, crowdsourcing where the crowd consists of students, is a collaborative learning method in which students create novel artefacts for their peers or future students to engage with and learn from. Typical learnersourcing activities include, for example, peer review and content creation, such as creating exercises, examples, or explanations. In computer science education, learnersourcing has been used to create programming exercises, SQL exercises, multiple-choice questions, and wiki pages, to mention a few.
For students, participation in learnersourcing activities can serve as an important learning tool that allows them to engage in higher-order thinking and practice feedback and communication strategies with their peers. For instructors, learnersourced artefacts offer the possibility of creating databanks of novel exercises or other artefacts that can be used as tools for review, alleviating the instructor's workload when it comes to creating new content for courses. However, as students are typically novices or otherwise inexperienced in the course topics, it is important to consider the quality of the student-created artefacts.
This work presents and brings together the results of six accompanying research articles that offer insight into the utilisation of learnersourcing tools in the context of computer science education, or more specifically, introductory programming and database courses. Various aspects of learnersourced artefact quality are considered, from student-created programming exercises to peer reviews. Quality is also approached from the instructors' perspective and compared to the views of students.
The results indicate that with proper guidance from the instructor, learnersourcing can be a viable method for promoting active participation and engaging students in deeper learning, all the while contributing to scalable resource development in computer science education. However, learnersourcing should not be seen as an easy solution where the instructor sets up the system once and the students handle their own learning process from exercise creation to assessment as long as the course runs. Instead, learnersourcing activities are likely novel to students and may seem more complicated than answering regular exercises, meaning that they will require additional support from the instructor and the course materials.
Availability of the dissertation
An electronic version of the doctoral dissertation will be available in the University of Helsinki open repository Helda at
Printed copies will be available on request from Nea Pirttinen: