Motivations, Learning and Creativity in Online Citizen Sceince Charlene Jennett, Laure Kloetzer, Daniel Schneider, Ioanna Iacovides, Anna L. Cox, Margaret Gold, Brian Fuchs, Alexandra Eveleigh, Kathleen Mathieu, Zoya Ajani and Yasmin Talsi

Online citizen science projects have demonstrated their usefulness for research, however little is known about the potential benefits for volunteers. We conducted 39 interviews (28 volunteers, 11 researchers) to gain a greater understanding of volunteers' motivations, learning and creativity (MLC). In our MLC model we explain that participating and progressing in a project community provides volunteers with many indirect opportunities for learning and creativity. The more aspects that volunteers are involved in, the more likely they are to sustain their participation in the project. These results have implications for the design and management of online citizen science projects. It is important to provide users with tools to communicate in order to supporting social learning, community building and sharing.

Citation

Jennett, J., Kloetzer, L., Schneider, D., Iacovides, I., Cox, A. L., Gold, M., Fuchs, B., Eveleigh, A., Mathieu, K., Ajani, Z. and Talsi, Y. (2016). ‘Motivations, learning and creativity in online citizen science’. JCOM 15 (03), A05.

Embedded videos

https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/15/03/JCOM_1503_2016_A05

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

This article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivativeWorks 4.0 License. The article attached is the publisher's pdf.
NHM Repository

ISSN

1824-2049