(29) Gear Up for Citizen Science: Developing a Health-Focused Online Course

Background: A citizen scientist is a member of the public who either works collaboratively with a scientist to gather data to solve a problem, or investigates a research question on their own. A team at the Library is developing an online course, Gearing Up for Discovery, to build research skills in citizen scientists. The Gearing Up edX course is unique in that it focuses on health-related projects, exploring citizen science through the lens of public health and environmental health. The project is funded with an award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine/Southeastern Atlantic Region.

Description: A team-based approach is being used to build an engaging asynchronous course for citizen scientists (also known as community scientists) who aspire to develop their own projects and investigate health-related issues in their communities. Course development team members bring experience in teaching, design, and citizen science and an external advisory committee contributes additional expertise. The course content breaks down citizen science research methods into understandable components that integrate project planning, ethical and legal issues, strategies for collecting and interpreting data, and communicating results. Instructional methodologies integrate short lectures, animation, interviews, and slides. Practical examples throughout the course will focus on public and environmental health topics geared toward non-researchers interested in developing their own projects. This presentation will also focus on the process, opportunities, and challenges involved in massive open online course (MOOC) development.

Conclusion: The course will come live in summer 2020 and will be promoted to a national audience. The Library team will collect data on the number of people enrolled in the course, the completion rate, and the number of views of individual classes. To assess the curriculum’s effectiveness, evaluation components such as pre- and post- tests, surveys, and quizzes will be embedded in each class. The Library team anticipates that Gearing Up for Discovery will provide participants with a better understanding of the complete research process and make clear the benefits that can be achieved through science.