We are excited to announce the return of our popular professional development opportunity: Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Collections.
This free online course is focused on public participation in science as it relates to digitization and research using biodiversity specimens. Public participation in science is sometimes referred to as citizen science, community science, or crowdsourcing.
The aim of the course is to empower participants with the knowledge and skills to successfully (1) identify and address the opportunities and additional complexity that public participation introduces to a digitization project at a biodiversity collection, including ethical and legal factors, (2) design a public participation in digitization project, including budgeting and risk management, (3) identify, evaluate, and use tools and online platforms in a public participation in digitization workflow, (4) identify and implement quality management strategies, (5) identify common participant motivations and strategies to recruit and engage participants in a project, including events, games, and online forums, (6) and perform evaluation of a public participation in digitization project.
This course is targeted at those already associated with a biodiversity collection, such as student technicians, collections managers, curators, affiliated educators, or administrators. The course will be relevant to a diversity of collection types. Participants do not need prior knowledge of public participation in science, only a desire to use it as part of their future research or digitization activities.
The course will occur from December 12–15 (Monday–Thursday) between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm Eastern. Participants can expect to spend three hours per day in synchronous meetings and as much as two additional hours of preparation time per day outside class. So this is about a 20-hour time commitment. We expect to cap the course at 25 participants. We will make admission decisions based on the relevance of the training to the future of the applicant’s organization and a desire to engage a diversity of perspectives. The course will be delivered in English.
Applications are closed.
Questions can be directed to Lauren Cohen (lcohen3@fsu.edu; iDigBio’s Workforce Development Manager) and Austin Mast (amast@fsu.edu; Director of iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Citizen Science Domain).
