# Mass Collaboration and Learning: Opportunities, Challenges, and Influential Factors
## 1 Introduction  
Significant advances in information and communication technology (ICT) and more specifically Internet-based solutions that have arisen over the last few years have opened new avenues to collaborate massively in ways seemed impossible even a few decades ago. There is a great shift from hierarchical collaboration towards online decentralized models. The number of people across the globe coming to take part in collaborative initiatives has increased to unprecedented levels. History shows that mass collaboration has been helping organizations and communities to potentially reduce the barriers of starting huge projects, and successfully leverage the resources, energy, skills, talents, and knowledge. When large numbers of self-organized members actively participate in collective learning, they can help with saving money, creating a social spirit, increasing transparency, outcome ownership, and awareness, and harnessing cognitive surplus [1]. Mass collaboration is a promising approach for agile knowledge creation and sharing. This fascinating phenomenon in education and learning was successfully proven by Wikipedia. However, in today's world of proliferation of knowledge, information, and data through the use of new digital tools, it is imperative for users to be well prepared to carefully pick those items that are reliable, true, and healthy. While the volume of online shared materials is astounding, identifying knowledge of high quality is now becoming a serious challenge. Unlike printed materials in serious newspapers, magazines, books, and academic libraries or similar information found in well-reputed radio and television broadcasts, knowledge transferred through the Internet and social media is not regulated for accuracy and quality. That is, anybody can publish anything they wish with very few limitations. People may present their opinion as a fact; and some individuals might find it as an ideal venue for personal, political, or commercial propaganda since there is novalidated systematic monitoring and assessment procedure to evaluate such distributed knowledge or information. No recognized organization or individual (a kind of watchdog entity) controls, verifies, and/or edits produced content. When it comes to mass level of collaboration, this situation may increase the risk of rapid and widespread dissemination of false and misleading knowledge or information from unknown sources which leads to deleterious effects [2]. The fact is that people are now collaborating more than any time in human history. There is a growing willingness among communities of all sizes from the emerging to the established ones for reaping the benefits of mass collaboration [3]. Despite tremendous achievements in this particular area, the concept and associated mechanism are still evolving. As such, there are still several ambiguities regarding the mass collaboration and learning process that researchers from different fields of study have to face. For instance, there are still no universally agreed specific ways for evaluating the quality of knowledge, or the set of corresponding measurement tools. Such a problem remains a major concern. This survey, therefore, intends to provide an overview of undertaken mass collaborative projects and initiatives over the last years with the purpose of synthesizing findings, clarifying the area-related concepts, trends, and open issues in the hope to identify research directions for solving the mentioned problems. In other words, this work aims to help better understand which instructional, technological, and technical bottlenecks, needs, or potentials in this field of study currently exist. The rest of the article is organized as follows: the base concepts of the survey are presented in Section 2, where we state our own definitions for both'mass collaboration' and 'collective intelligence'. The adopted approach and methodology for data collection and analysis are briefly explained in Section 3.