Create Separate Accounts for Students Assigned to Use iNaturalist

Feature Requests
63

I think this has been an amazing discussion that’s brought out many perspectives and ideas. I am, however, going to close it because

  • I don’t think Student Accounts will be implemented any time soon (it would take a lot of time to create entirely different types of accounts and workflows for those accounts, plus documentation of said account types and workflows, and promotion of said account types and workflows) and I want to get your votes back to you.

  • From this discussion it seems like other avenues that are less resource-intensive that should help mitigate the issue. Here’s what we’re working on:

    • An Identify filter that allows one to not see observations from accounts made in the last week (or, conversely, to see observations from accounts created only in the last week). This will allow IDers to avoid seeing a flood of student observations as they are currently happening, or to focus on only those types of accounts. We’re currently testing this out now on the staff side, and it’s doing pretty well filtering out observations from the 2019 Ecoblitz happening today in California.

    • We’re looking into some sort of user privileges structure analogous to Discourse’s Trust System (but also different) to try and prevent spam messages, lots of IDs being added by very new users, and projects created by inexperienced iNat users. I do want to stress that this is preliminary so I’m making no promises one way or the other here.

    • Better documentation for educators, and making that documentation more visible. If anyone wants to start a tutorial we can draw from in the Tutorials category, that would be awesome, I was hoping we could have teachers create some there.

    • Improved onboarding for new users, especially mobile users.

    • A much improved Seek app which is due out next month, that we can push as an alternative for educators.

I know this is not everything that’s been asked for, but I think they’re good starts and I want thank everyone for really digging deep into the issue, and for taking your time to go through a lot of observations you may not have wanted to add IDs to or mark as captive, so thank you so much.

I definitely think this discussion should continue at @charlie’s topic here because I’m sure more ideas will pop up, and I don’t consider this “solved” by any means. Thanks again, everyone.

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