What is online citizen science anyway? An educational perspective

Abstract: In this paper we seek to contribute to the debate about the nature of citizen involvement in real scientific projects by the means of online tools that facilitate crowdsourcing and collaboration. We focus on an understudied area, the impact of online citizen science participation on the science education of school age children. We present a binary tree of online citizen science process flows and the results of an anonymous survey among primary school teachers in New Zealand that are known advocates of science education. Our findings reveal why teachers are interested in using online citizen science in classroom activities and what they are looking for when making their choice for a particular project to use. From these characteristics we derive recommendations for the optimal embedding of online citizen science in education related to the process, the context, and the dissemination of results.