Benefits and challenges of incorporating citizen science into university education.

ABSTRACT: A common feature of many citizen science projects is the collection of data by unpaid contributors with the expectation that the data will be used in research. Here we report a teaching strategy that combined citizen science with inquiry-based learning to offer first year university students an authentic research experience. A six-year partnership with the Australian phenology citizen science program ClimateWatch has enabled biology students from the University of Western Australia to contribute phenological data on plants and animals, and to conduct the first research on unvalidated species datasets contributed by public and university participants. Students wrote scientific articles on their findings, peer-reviewed each other's work and the best articles were published online in a studen

SUBMITTER: Mitchell N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665417 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature