BRITEC’s Intellectual Output 5 is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “A Roadmap to Citizen Science Education” that was developed by European Schoolnet with the support from all partners. The developed course consists of four modules and includes a peerreview final activity. Offered in English to teachers that are interested in bringing science in their class through designing, developing and implementing citizen science education projects, this MOOC ran on the EUN Academy (http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/), – a free online professional development platform for teachers and other education professionals. “A Roadmap to Citizen Science Education” course was open to all who is willing to take it and joining the course did not require previous knowledge of the course topic.
The aim of this online training was to equip teachers with materials and stories of implementation from innovative citizen science education projects. Citizen Science Education is based on the assumption that teachers and researchers can find a common ground of discussion and develop practices that are advantageous both, for the education sector, and the science sector. Therefore, this course proposes a process of collaboration between teachers and researchers. It provides insights from the perspective of researchers that have supported teachers developing STEM learning scenarios that include scientific activities based on the needs of active research projects. The pedagogical information offered in this course revolves around raising awareness regarding the latest developments in the field of STEM didactics. The main objective of this MOOC however, is to provide instructional design guidelines and the necessary resources so that teachers can develop a learning scenario of their own.”. More specifically, the MOOC’s objectives were the following:
- Learn more about the process of integrating scientific activities in STEM teaching
- Explore the possibilities that classrooms’ learning environment can utilize once teachers’ and scientists’ forces are combined
- Learn how to contextualize in class deeper scientific knowledge while keeping the teaching engaging
- Develop a citizen science learning scenario
While the main target audience was primary and secondary school teachers, and researchers from Europe and beyond, this MOOC was open to any interested teachers of other subjects who would like to learn more about Citizen science.
The MOOC brought together teachers from different European countries, involved them in a dialogue on Citizen science and built a community of committed teachers. In this report we provide an overview of the design of the course, the implementation, and the evaluation. While this report is considered confidential, the MOOC itself is open and available to anybody interested in the materials (without certification):
