Designing citizen science tools for learning: lessons learnt from the iterative development of nQuire

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time

The Sense-it App: A Smartphone Toolkit for Citizen Inquiry Learning

The authors describe the design and formative evaluation of a sensor toolkit for Android smartphones and tablets that supports inquiry-based science learning. The Sense-it app enables a user to access all the motion, environmental and position sensors available on a device, linking these to a website for shared crowd-sourced investigations. The authors describe the four investigations with the toolkit: environmental noise, sunlight levels, air pressure and rainfall, and the speed of lifts (elevators). These show a variety of methods to initiate, orchestrate and conclude inquiry-based science learning. Two of the missions are in the context of a study to develop a community of inquiry around weather and meteorology. The others are intended to engage members of the public in practical science activities. Analysis of the missions and the associated online discussions reveals that the Sense-it toolkit can be adopted for engaging science investigations, though the practical issue of calibrating sensors on personal devices needs to be addressed

Citizen Inquiry: Engaging Citizens in Online Communities of Scientific Inquiries

Citizen Inquiry has been proposed as an informal science learning approach to enable widespread involvement in science and empower citizens with reasoning and problem-solving skills used by scientists. It combines aspects from citizen science and inquiry-based learning, producing science learning experiences within distributed communities of interest. A central challenge for Citizen Inquiry is to involve citizens in planning and implementing their own investigations, supported and guided by online systems and tools within an inquiry environment, while collaborating with science experts and non-experts. This thesis explores how to create an active and sustainable online community for citizens to engage in scientific investigations. To this end, it investigates the design of online communities, recruitment and retaining of members, factors that engage or disengage members from the community, and whether and how members learn throughout their participation. The intervention comprises two iterations of Citizen Inquiry communities: ‘Inquiring Rock Hunters’ and ‘Weather-it’. The communities were accommodated by the nQuire platform and the nQuire-it toolkit, respectively, software designed and structured to support collaborative personally-meaningful inquiry learning. The findings of this research are explained through an analysis that compared the two design studies with previous research on citizen participation projects and online communities. Results highlight the importance of frequent project communication, multiple ways of participation, software usability, and interaction and collaboration between the members, while indicating disengagement factors such as lack of time, interest and confidence. Different categories of learning are identified (activity, on-topic and community), emphasizing the understanding of inquiry activities as part of a complete scientific process and the balance between fun and learning. The thesis concludes with design considerations for the creation of future Citizen Inquiry and other citizen participation communities

STEM Learning: Futures

Following on from the account of some CALRG research related to STEM learning in the previous chapter we discuss here several examples of attempts to explore the technology and pedagogy of learning science. In one thread we look at informal learning and linking journeys between formal and informal learning and how we have built on previous work on developing inquiry learning. In the second we look at a design to support collaborative working at a distance building on our previous work on learning from simulations. The case studies in this chapter illustrate the persistent intent of supporting science learners and a shared vision of the range of support under development for this end

State-of-the-art analysis of the pedagogical underpinnings of open science, citizen science and open innovation activities

The document corresponds to O2A1 of the INOS Project. This state-of-theart analysis elaborates on the current state of knowledge on learning design in open science, citizen science, and innovation activities, in order to improve their pedagogical value. This includes reporting on the different types of activities, the learning design of these activities, and the learning outcomes of these activities

Mobile and Accessible Learning for MOOCs

Many modern web-based systems provide a ‘responsive’ design that allows material and services to be accessed on mobile and desktop devices, with the aim of providing ubiquitous access. Besides offering access to learning materials such as podcasts and videos across multiple locations, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies have some additional affordances that may enable new forms of learning on MOOCs. We can divide these into two categories: firstly, context-sensitive features including delivery of content for a specific location, enabling a seamless continuity of learning across settings, and linking people in a location with others in a virtual representation of that place; secondly social learning opportunities to connect people as they move within and across locations, to enable crowd-sourced learning. In this paper we explore these aspects of mobile and accessible learning for MOOCs, drawing on examples from MOOC courses, mobile toolkits, and crowd-sourced learning sites