The socio-ecological crisis, i.e. the critical relationship between the global society and the planet’s natural resources and its impact on the near future, raises fundamental questions about sustainability as well as education for sustainable development (Hopwood et al. 2005). To address ecological, social and economic challenges, civic participation on a massive scale is required (Hawkins & Wang 2012). In the light of recent developments within the field of information and communication technology, the crowd can be understood as a social entity that relates closely to societal processes of transformation (Reichelt et al. in press) and is consequently highly relevant for the pedagogical debate, especially when thinking about education under the conditions of risk and uncertainty. Therefore, it is crucial to discuss, seed and cultivate new forms of social interaction and engagement in order to promote sustainable development. Questions of sustainability in a fluid network society (Stalder 2018) can only be addressed if new forms of mass participation are leveraged to empower humans and to establish collective agency. Therefore, we need educational settings that facilitate individual and collective forms of involvement and participation as well as innovative technological solutions in support of crowd efforts. These settings shall provide a space that allows participants to collectively inquire into their understanding of the world and devise new forms of being and acting which are based on the vision of a sustainable development (UNESCO 2014). Recent social occurrences exemplify the power of crowds, especially when tackling questions of equality, democracy and ecology. But the crowd and its potential has only been marginally discussed as an educational resource and arena. We conceptualize the crowd as a social entity which realizes not only an augmentation of participants but inherently introduces new social and interactional qualities. This also entails the task to reframe education in itself and to address the question of how collective agency could be established. To develop an understanding of crowds and crowd dynamics within the context of education for sustainable development, we take part in a design-based research project that integrates the development of crowd-based collaborative software tools and research-based learning in higher education. In this contribution, we identify major requirements by analyzing recent crowd phenomena and suggest a set of respective high-level design principles. In short, we outline a pedagogical scenario that combines civic empowerment and engagement for sustainable development with emergent principles and technologies of mass collaboration.

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