Citizen Science Projects: How to make a difference (MOOC)

Citizen Science Projects: How to make a difference, is a massive open online course (MOOC). It was developed by the H2020 WeObserve project and ran on the FutureLearn platform from 2019. The course was designed to assist learners from all backgrounds and geographical locations to discover how to build their own citizen science project to address global challenges and create positive change. It also helped learners with interpreting the information they collected and using their findings to educate others about important local and global concerns. The main learning objectives for the course were: ∗ Discover what citizen science and citizen observatories are ∗ Engage with the general process of a citizen science project, the tools used and where they can be accessed ∗ Collect and analyse data on relevant issues such as environmental challenges and disaster management, and discuss the results of their findings ∗ Explore projects happening around the world, what the aims of these projects are and how learners could get involved ∗ Model the steps to create their own citizen science project ∗ Evaluate the potential of citizen science in bringing about change This course also provided five open-source, downloadable tools which have been tested in previous citizen science projects and created for the use of a wider range of projects. These tools are listed below and available in the research repository: ∗Empathy timeline tool ∗Community-level indicators tool ∗Data postcards tool ∗Future newspaper tool ∗Co-evaluation too