Citizen Science, an introduction
Welcome to this free online introductory course about citizen science – the participation of people outside science (universities, research centres and government bodies) in scientific research.
This 5-module course will introduce you to the concept of citizen science and give you an accessible overview of some of the important aspects of citizen science, such as IT, understanding participants’ motivations, evaluation and environmental citizen science.
The course was developed as part of the NERC-funded Opening up science for all! project. It was designed to be very accessible for anyone interested in citizen science. For a more comprehensive and academic course, see the free UCL course ‘Introduction to Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing’, which this course was partly built on.
We hope you will enjoy the course and find it useful and informative.
Practical information
This course is an open online course with five modules. Each module has some recommended reading and video lectures which will take up to an hour. In addition to this, modules also have a summary sheet with the main points from the video lectures, an activity for you to work with the module topic and additional reading if you would like to learn more.
This course
These five topics will introduce you to some of the important aspects of developing and running citizen science projects.