  Online learners spend millions of hours per year testing their new skills on
assignments with known answers. This paper explores whether framing research
questions as assignments with unknown answers helps learners generate novel,
useful, and difficult-to-find knowledge while increasing their motivation by
contributing to a larger goal. Collaborating with the American Gut Project, the
world's largest crowdfunded citizen science project, we deploy Gut Instinct to
allow novices to generate hypotheses about the constitution of the human gut
microbiome. The tool enables online learners to explore learning material about
the microbiome and create their own theories around causal variances for
microbiome. Building on crowdsourcing or serious games that use people as
replaceable units, this work-in-progress lays our plans for how people (a) use
their personal knowledge (b) towards solving a larger real-world goal (c) that
can provide potential benefits to them. We hope to demonstrate that Gut
Instinct citizen scientists generate useful hypotheses, perform better on
learning tasks than traditional MOOC learners, and are better engaged with the
learning material.
