TEACHxperts: Citizen Science: Engaging your Students and the Public in your Research
Citizen Science: Engaging your Students and the Public in your Research
Light refreshments will be provided for this talk:
Citizen science – engaging the public in research – is transforming the way we do research and has proved a creative and potent response to the ever increasing sizes of our scientific datasets. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in the number of valid citizen science projects launched; over 500 projects are listed at CitizenScience.gov alone. In parallel, a growing number of universities are recognizing citizen science as a powerful tool for engaging students in real research and exploring data collection, manipulation, analysis, and interpretation.
In this interactive session, we will engage in a discussion around different models for incorporating citizen science into your courses. I will highlight examples for how individual faculty as well as institutions more broadly are approaching this, both for hands-on, location based citizen science (particularly ecology/environmental science/biology) as well as online citizen science (applicable across the disciplines). For the latter, I will draw on examples from Zooniverse in particular. Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for online citizen science, engaging more than 1.6 million people around the world in tasks including tagging animals in wildlife images, discovering planets, transcribing artist's notebooks, and tracking resistance to antibiotics. The platform currently supports over 80 active projects, in collaboration with hundreds of researchers across the disciplines, and has led to over 150 peer-reviewed articles. Zooniverse has been used in hundreds of classrooms around the world.
During this session, participants will:
Learn more about Citizen Science
Discover how they can create a Zooniverse project
Engage students in real research and data collection