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Poster Short Abstract

Experiences from teaching 2 courses in Citizen Science for PhD students are presented. We had 28 participants in total from all 5 faculties at our university. Exercises gave the participants important knowledge about collaboration with citizens and 6 of them are conducting CS projects now.

Poster Abstract

Our experiences from organizing 2 Citizen Science courses for PhD students at University of Southern Denmark are presented. The courses were 4 full days, and we had 28 participants in total. The aim was to teach the participants about the principles and possibilities of Citizen Science and enable them to apply these methods to their own projects. Cases presented by researchers with experience in developing and running CS projects were part of the course and gave good insight and started relevant discussions among the participants.

The poster will reflect on the following themes:

1. Aligning CS models with PhD students’ projects

2. The scare of involving actual citizens

3. CS across disciplines

4. Teaching CS in practice

The importance of communication and giving something back to the citizens was challenging for some of the participants but the exercises helped to comprehend this: Making a research teaser and then designing and running a pilot workshop with citizens gave an impression of the skills needed to engage the public in the research process.

From the course evaluations we can conclude that many of the participants are very likely to or to some extent intend to use CS methods in their future research projects. Follow-up has revealed that at least 6 of the participants are conducting CS projects now.