Designing a Framework for Crowdsourcing Educational Content in Media: A Qualitative Study of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting

Objective
Knowledge-intensive and creative organizations increasingly require continuous, flexible, and job-relevant learning to respond to technological change and maintain organizational adaptability. This need is particularly important in media organizations, where employees accumulate extensive technical, production-related, and experiential knowledge, while formal training systems are often centralized, periodic, and insufficiently responsive to emerging workplace needs. In the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), much of this knowledge remains dispersed among individuals and organizational units and is not systematically converted into reusable educational content. Consequently, valuable experience is transferred informally, unevenly, or remains unused. Crowdsourcing may offer a mechanism through which employees contribute their expertise, practical lessons, and problem-solving experience to the organizational learning system. However, implementation in a large and regulation-oriented media organization requires more than a digital platform; it also depends on governance, legal responsibility, organizational culture, employee motivation, instructional design, quality assurance, and sustainability. This study therefore aimed to assess the feasibility of crowdsourcing internal educational content at IRIB and to identify its principal barriers, requirements, and organizational preconditions.
The study views crowdsourcing as a participatory knowledge-management and organizational-learning mechanism that decentralizes knowledge creation. It can reveal less-visible experts, accelerate the circulation of practical knowledge, reduce the loss of tacit expertise, and make educational resources more responsive to workplace problems. Yet its effectiveness depends on clear processes, organizational alignment, appropriate incentives, supportive leadership, accessible technology, and reliable validation. Crowdsourcing may complement formal human-resource development by allowing employees to produce and share educational resources based on their professional knowledge and real organizational problems. Nevertheless, limited research has examined crowd-sourced internal training content in large, formalized media organizations. The research gap therefore concerns the lack of systematic understanding of the barriers and requirements involved in converting employees’ dispersed knowledge into formal and usable organizational learning resources.
Research Methodology
The research used a qualitative, inductive, and question-driven design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with informed participants from inside and outside IRIB. Internal participants included managers, advisers, and experts involved in human-resource development, training governance, organizational learning, knowledge management, knowledge sharing, and educational infrastructure. External participants included academics and specialists in organizational education, employee participation, knowledge management, and participatory learning systems. Purposive sampling, supplemented by snowball sampling, continued until theoretical saturation. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted, and focus groups were used to review, refine, and complete the emerging findings. Credibility and confirmability were strengthened through the diversity of participants, systematic documentation of the interpretation and analysis process, and review of the findings by academic and professional experts. The data were analyzed through systematic thematic analysis. Repeated reading of the interview transcripts was followed by segmentation into meaning units and initial coding. A total of 325 initial codes were extracted. After removing repetitions and merging conceptually similar codes, 66 refined conceptual codes remained. These codes were hierarchically organized into 53 subthemes, 14 secondary themes, and five overarching themes.
Findings
The results show that the feasibility of crowdsourcing educational content is shaped by an interconnected organizational ecosystem rather than by isolated individual factors. Of the 66 refined codes, 48 represented inhibiting conditions. Barriers were concentrated mainly in motivation and participation culture, representing approximately 46% of the references, followed by organizational enablers and implementation infrastructure at approximately 22%. This pattern indicates that the central problem is not the absence of knowledge, but the lack of organizational conditions required to produce, share, formalize, and reuse that knowledge.  The final feasibility framework contains five interdependent dimensions:
 
 

Governance, legal arrangements, and strategy. Crowdsourcing requires explicit rules concerning authority, confidentiality, permitted content, publication levels, access, attribution, copyright, organizational responsibility, and the formal route from contribution to approval. Where these boundaries are unclear, employees become risk-averse and either avoid participation or provide limited and low-value content. Heavy procedures for approving trainers and educational content can also delay useful contributions. Strategic sponsorship, a designated process owner, phased implementation, and realistic implementation horizon are therefore essential.
Motivation and participation culture. Sustainable contribution occurs only when employees perceive participation as valuable, fair, safe, and professionally meaningful. Major barriers include unclear material benefits, insufficient recognition, weak links to performance evaluation or career development, fear of judgment, low psychological safety, distrust, and an ownership-oriented view of knowledge. Some experts may also fear losing their positional advantage or becoming replaceable after sharing their expertise. The framework therefore requires financial, administrative, professional, and symbolic incentives, together with recognition, visibility, trust-building, and protection from punitive interpretations of shared mistakes.
Organizational enablers and implementation infrastructure. High workloads, lack of formally allocated time, fragmented expertise, insufficient support roles, and the absence of an integrated platform reduce sustained participation. The organization needs an infrastructure that supports idea submission, content upload, minimum standardization, review, publication, search, feedback, monitoring, and updating. It should be integrated with existing human-resource, learning-management, and intranet systems rather than creating parallel administrative work. Knowledge mapping and expert-identification mechanisms are also needed to locate relevant contributors throughout the organization.
Learning design and demand management. Producing more content does not necessarily result in effective learning. Contributions must be connected to occupational needs, target groups, competency gaps, performance objectives, and appropriate learning levels. Without needs assessment, prioritization, job analysis, and demand management, content may become fragmented, repetitive, or irrelevant. The framework consequently emphasizes problem-based design, updated topic selection, standard content formats, adult-learning considerations, and a clear and traceable route from idea to publication.
Quality, effectiveness, and sustainability. Organizational trust depends on reliable but non-bureaucratic quality assurance. Minimum standards should address professional accuracy, instructional suitability, and technical adequacy. A proportionate multi-stage review process can combine peer screening with specialist validation. Success should be assessed not only by the number of contributors or uploaded materials but also by utilization, user satisfaction, workplace applicability, learning transfer, feedback, and improvement over time. Maintenance, periodic updating, monitoring, and repeatable participation processes are required for long-term sustainability.

Discussion & Conclusion
The findings indicate that the principal barriers are systemic and interactional rather than individual. Governance ambiguity discourages contribution; weak incentives and low psychological safety reduce knowledge sharing; lack of time and infrastructure prevents participation from becoming manageable; poor instructional targeting diminishes demand; and inadequate quality assurance undermines organizational trust. Weakness in any one dimension can erode the effectiveness of the other dimensions. Crowdsourcing must therefore be designed as an integrated, multilayer architecture that simultaneously makes participation safe, fair, low-friction, administratively visible, instructionally relevant, and professionally credible. The five dimensions should not be treated as independent recommendations. They function as connected links in a single implementation chain, and failure in one link may reduce crowdsourcing to fragmented, temporary, and informal activities.   IRIB should establish written policies for confidentiality, publication levels, attribution, editing, reuse, and responsibility. Content production and review should be formally recognized within working hours and supported by transparent financial and non-financial incentives. An integrated platform should manage the full content lifecycle, with clearly assigned facilitation, technical, review, and maintenance roles. Production priorities should reflect recurring occupational problems and identified skill gaps. Standard formats may be developed for micro-learning materials, practical guides, case studies, and short instructional presentations. A lightweight multi-stage review system should balance credibility with speed, combining peer review for initial screening and specialist review for final validation. Post-publication monitoring should assess utilization, satisfaction, workplace applicability, corrective feedback, and the need for content updating.
Crowdsourcing can transform IRIB’s dispersed employee knowledge into valid, reusable, and up-to-date educational assets, but only when five domains are implemented coherently: governance and legal clarity, motivation and participation culture, organizational and technological enablers, learning design and demand management, and quality and sustainability. The study offers a context-grounded feasibility framework for analyzing the barriers and enabling conditions of crowdsourced education in large media organizations. It demonstrates that crowdsourced education is not simply a content-generation technique or a digital repository. Rather, it is an institutional learning system whose viability depends on the alignment of rules, incentives, infrastructure, occupational learning needs, and quality controls. Only through such alignment can employees’ individual and dispersed knowledge become a credible, accessible, and sustainable organizational educational resource.