Tonight’s OERxDomains21 session was by Nashwa Ismail and Christothea Herodotou and focused on online citizen science. This is timely since yesterday we were trying to figure out an appropriate way of mentioning in text citizen science and emphasizing that it is for all, not only citizens! This session was entitled “How can facilitation by experts support learning in online citizen science?,” and they discussed nQuire (nquire.org.uk). I did know about nQuire! Heredotou described the platform and the “missions” and “investigations” shared there. They have confidential missions as well as open missions, categorized according to how you share the data. The vision of nQuire is to empower people to think and act as scientists by taking part in investigations AND set up their own investigations. The speakers are from The Open University, and have shared the nQuire resources with countries in Africa. Ismail mentioned that participants were given an opportunity to reflect on their participation. For their research, they surveyed participants and content experts and used thematic analysis of their method. The study used five questions to learn about professional development and online teaching thoughts shared by respondents. The responses also provided feedback on what areas of nQuire to improve and focus on. Some challenges mentioned were how to handle online learning, large enrollment courses, and assessment. Learners using nQuire shared communicated, felt engaged, and reflected on practices. Some also mentioned responding to questions; however, the researchers noted that they could evaluate the impact of participation on decision making, for example. I thought how they explained the role of the educational expert was particularly interesting: as a facilitator to link various learners. Herodotou mentioned that future studies will continue to evaluate the role of educational experts in nQuire and how to visualize data so that participants are able to see their data compared to others. Ismail talked about learning more about participants and their background information to better tailor activities and investigations. I enjoyed this session’s combination of outreach, open, and citizen or participatory science. I did not know about nQuire and wonder if there is a place for Delftia investigations and partnering with others.
A second session I watched by Ruslan Synytsky and Tim Owens discussed Jelastic and Reclaim Cloud Hosting. Synytsky is a developer and discussed how they built websites and applications for customers. Synytsky then developed containers for flexibility and scalability as a new service. Instead of Amazon Web Services, customers (and mostly developers?) can use Jelastic, pay for only the resources they use, and have flexibility of how they run applications. Owens mentioned that it was appealing for people who may not be developers. Reclaim Hosting used the powerful scaling capabilities as an educational customer. While I don’t understand “vertical scaling” and the details, I do find how the “backend” of systems really fascinating. I think it helps inform us about the capabilities of the “websites” and platforms we are using as well as the peace of mind of knowing scalability of resources and disaster recovery safeguards for our precious data. I have wondered if some systems are less reliable than other available ones, and this session helped me learn more about the backend and Reclaim Hosting.
