Training: Create your own nQuire project

As part of our commitment to upskilling HEI staff and students and community members, Alice Sheppard, UCL’s Community Manager, gave a 30 minute webinar on how to create a new citizen science project using the nQuire platform, which you can find at https://nquire.org.uk/.

This webinar followed on from Create Your Own Zooniverse Project, which you can read about here.

The nQuire platform is a British collaboration between the BBC and the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology. It’s a platform on which there are a great many citizen science projects, but of a very different style to the Zooniverse: much more text-based, long-answer questions, with tools such as sliders to indicate the extent to which you agree with a statement, for example.

We are not representatives of the nQuire platform and we included a disclaimer that what we say may not have represented their views. However, Alice and Alex at UCL attended an all-day session on the platform a few years ago, so Alice able to describe the story of the platform. Alice was also very grateful to Thea Herodotou, who works at nQuire, for a kind e-mail she sent, saying she was happy for our webinar to go ahead and inviting all participants to contact her if they wanted any help creating a project!

Alice showed a series of screenshots creating a “dummy project”, showing how to set it up and how to use the great variety of answer tools the project has to offer. She then set webinar participants a task to create a similar project, asking a series of very simple questions about participation in citizen science projects, which encouraged the project builder to try out as many of the different tools as possible.

As with the Create Your Own Zooniverse project, the aim was not for anyone to create a serious project but simply to give it a try in a relaxed atmosphere. We hope this was achieved and that our participants enjoyed it.