A crowd-sourced, collaborative education is a smart alternative to top-down learning, but it can easily become counterproductive. “Project Classroom Makeover” by Cathy Davidson showed the success of collaborative education with Apples Digital Campus. “The Naked Citadel” by Susan Faludi showed the destructiveness and failure of crowd-sourced education at The Citadel. In the case where crowd-sourcing failed, it was because of a lack of supervision. When crowd-sourcing succeeded, a professor was involved from the beginning. The need for responsible supervisors, the attention span of students, and the mob mentality of a group, all affect the success of a crowd-sourced, collaborative environment. Student-led learning should start out with competent supervision, not wait for an incident before stepping in to provide leadership. Having a competent professor from the start is integral to successful student-led learning. Davidson says, “We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their profs decided to use iPods in a course, … [the students] would receive a free Duke-branded iPod” (49). Apple initiated the student-led discussion of iPod applications by just asking them to create the applications. If their professors agreed, then Apple would give the students and professor free iPods. If Apple had not come to the students with the idea
