HEIDI Webinar: Create Your Own Citizen Science Project - nQuire

The Erasmus+ HEIDI project is including a series of Citizen Science Training Webinars to encourage people to try out citizen science - not just participating in projects, but, if they wish, creating and running their own.

What is this webinar about?

This short webinar will introduce you to nQuire, an award-winning citizen science platform hosted by the Open University and which hosts many public projects on a variety of subjects. Many nQuire projects take the form of questionnaires and ask about people's knowledge and opinions, or invite people to upload photographs. HEIDI project member Alice Sheppard will:

• Give a short talk about nQuire, its history and the website's features
• Give a short demonstration of how to build a project
• Supply you with a bank of questions which you can use to design a prototype nQuire questionnaire, using a variety of the platform's tools, and a short information sheet with advice from one of nQuire's founders
• Give you a short, 10-minute introductory exercise which will allow you to create a prototype nQuire project

You will not create a real nQuire project that would be published, nor will you be required to follow up on it - though we hope that you will be inspired to do so in the future.

This webinar follows a similar one at 4pm BST on the Zooniverse platform, which you can find here. There will be a 15 minute break in between, but you can stay signed in if you wish to attend both.

Who is it for?

Anyone who is interested in citizen science or considering building a project of their own. You do not have to be a professional researcher or expert, as citizen science is for everyone. Beginners are welcome.

You will not be required to take part in the project-building exercise - you are welcome to just watch and get comfortable!

Citizen Science For All Talks

The Citizen Science for All Talks is a series of webinars and special events which invite world-leading experts on citizen science to give a talk in their field of expertise to share their experiences and knowledge with our diverse audience, including those who at the moment know very little about Citizen Science. You can see a list of our current ones here.

What Is Citizen Science?

There are many forms of Citizen Science, and no single definition captures them all! In general, it means that members of the public who aren’t currently working as scientists get involved in scientific research. This may be something very simple like using their smartphone to measure sky brightness, or it may be very involved such as getting a group of people together and learning scientific methods to monitor and report pollution. There are many public Citizen Science projects on an enormous range of topics.

What Is HEIDI?

The Erasmus+ project, HEIDI (“Digital Action at HEIs as a catalyst for social change in the Covid-19 crisis”), aims to provide training (for staff, decision makers, students, librarians, and communities) enabling Higher Education Institutions to better embrace and support bottom-up digital action (i.e. hackathons, datathons and citizen science initiatives). Until 2023 we will be running 90 events (in the UK, France, Malta, Cyprus and Greece) and aim to engage more than 3,000 people.

Disclaimer: Neither HEIDI nor Alice Sheppard are part of the nQuire platform and we do not officially represent them. However, UCL ExCiteS regularly teaches citizen science courses and the use of various platforms.

HEIDI is supported by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 2020-1-UK01-KA226-HE-094667.