Launching a citizen science course – week 1

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Today, I gave the opening lectures of the new UCL course ‘Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing‘. In a way, it was more work than I originally thought, but I also thought that I’m underestimating the effort – so it’s not completely unexpected.

Although I am responsible for the first installation of Moodle, the virtual learning environment, at UCL in 2003, I have not used it in the context of an online course for remote learners. I have experienced the development of the Esri Survey123 module with Patrick Rickles and the excellent team at Esri that done most the work. It’s actually quite a challenge. Luckily, the e-learning support team of UCL was happy to guide us and set us on an appropriate path of developing the material for the course.

Having the course materialising is also closing a part of the original ExCiteS proposal that was left open. Here what the proposal for Challenging Engineering said: “In the fourth year, the research group will begin to consolidate the technology (with the first PhD students completing their studies) and will develop a further focused research proposal utilising the lessons from Adventure 2… In this year, a module on Citizen Science will be offered for MSc and PhD students at UCL.”. The project officially started in September 2011, so the fourth year was 2016 – so launching it in early 2018, within the 2017/2018 academic year should be considered to be on time in academic proposal terms!

Compared to things that I’ve done in the past, I have to note that the evolution of what is considered as boring technology – e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint (MSPP) – is instrumental to the ability to put this course together. Below you’ll see the opening segment. In actual terms, the extra effort to turn it into online teaching material was not huge – record voice over in MSPP, save as a video, upload to YouTube, link to Moodle (or here). I do hope that we’re getting it right with the course, but I’ll see as we develop it.

The rest of the lecture is available on UCLeXtend.

citizen cyberscience, citizen science, history of science, teaching, UCL, VGI