I got one of my former professors interested in iNat and he’s since used it for a class project 2 years in a row. For some reason he sets the filters to include Casual and RG but exclude Needs ID… I tried emailing him to explain it but I never heard back haha.
All of the professors I’ve had who do use iNat (some of my favourite profs!) don’t use it very well. It’s surprising how difficult it is to notice, navigate, or explain the intricacies of iNat even for a professor, like: how to add multiple photos to an observation, how to make sure all the metadata is there so half your observations don’t end up casual, etc.
The project seems to be gone. A very bad result, since now we can’t find the observations to fix them. Can the project be reconsituted temporarily somehow?
Oh, my. The iNat staff would never delete a project like this, would they? Can we assume this was the action of the project admin/instructor? A decision to “get rid of the evidence” of a badly run project–except that all of the observations remain? Edit: I’ll be slightly more generous by offering a different interpretation. It had be noted that the admin did not appear to have much experience on iNat. Perhaps, if the class assignment has come to an end, that admin decided that the project simply wasn’t needed anymore?
Luckily for us, almost all of the observations for this project were from a very small geographic area, so we can use the Explore tab with a bounding box to see them, without including too many unrelated observations.
I did reach out to the instructor with some of the guidelines and pointers of using iNaturalist in the classroom setting ( iNaturalist Educator’s Guide : iNaturalist Help)… He decided to delete the project.
Now, this doesn’t remove the observations that have already been made, and thanks to @larry216 for the ID page, but at least it prevents a whole slew of new observations being made that may have the same issues.
Anywho, whenever I do see projects like this from a class, I try to reach out to the profs/leaders/teachers just to see if they’ve checked out the guidelines for using it in the class. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
HOWEVER, I do get joy out of those one or two students that genuinely jump on to iNaturalist and sincerely enjoy the tool/community. For those students, I think it’s worth all the headaches! :)
I’ll try to toss on ID’s for the ones that I can from this area.
I got a similar message from the instructor. Seems like they had no idea that 500+ students’ observations could cause any trouble (yes, there were that many- not all of them followed the instructions). They deleted the project in an attempt to help fix the issue- I don’t think they realized that doing so wouldn’t delete the observations.
After deleting the project they also deleted their account- I really wish I could have responded first. Hopefully they came out of this with a better understanding of how iNat works and will look for other ways to involve their students in the platform. And I really do hope that some of the students keep up with it.
Could there be a popup during the project creation process to the tune of “hey if you’re an educator and this is the first time you’ve made a project for a class, here’s a resource for setting up students for success and getting the most out of a class project” with a link to the educators guide. Or if not a popup, then something else that would be difficult to scroll past without acknowledging while making the project. This wouldn’t help the educators who don’t us a project to track their students’ observations, but it might have helped here.
On the contrary, it’s better for classes to have a project, because then there is a project head to contact. Often times I see a sudden increase of obviously student observations in an area around a school, but there is no associated project, so the best I can do is comment on several individual observations with a message along the lines of “please tell your teacher/professor this fact about the way iNat works” and hope someone relays the message.
When I suggested the project flag at the beginning of the discussion, I was envisaging a temporary lock that would prevent additional observations being added to the project until an admin confirms that they understand the issues that led to the flag and commits to passing info along to their students to improve their observations.
That said, such a flag could just be discouraging and problematic for classes that only have so much time to make observations before frost (or the end of the semester). And locking the project from accepting new observations would make the new observations harder for identifiers to find. I think ensuring that educators get more info before or as they make their first project would set them up better than trying to correct the issue only after the horses are out of the barn.
Yes, in this case getting rid of the project seems to have accomplished nothing except to make it harder to find the observations that need work. It seems to me that it’s much better to have them in a project. That way, if the person who started it doesn’t clean it up, someone else can.
I did what I could. There is not that much that I can identify at this time of year and in that part of the country, but it was impressive to notice some of the grass identifiers at work, and I appreciate having had the opportunity. For the first time, I’m starting to get the impression that there is something there to distinguish, which from my experience with gulls, is a key first step. (It’s not that I didn’t believe you, but believing is not the same as seeing.)
At some point, it might become mandatory for any biology teacher, during their teacher training, to pass a course on how to use iNat. Just like community colleges require proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.
And iNat might develop a sandbox version for students:
In the early days of car ownership, there were a lot of accidents. There were a lot of deaths. People did not expect a private vehicle to come flying down a road and smack into them.
This is the early days of iNat. This thread is about an accident, where the “driver” was well-intentioned, but actually kept making things worse.
Today, cars have never been safer. iNat is also improving things all the time!
As it is on the same subject, I wanted to point out another similar project with similar problems: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mmae-keyptaun I don’t know how about other organism groups, but in lichens they are uploading a lot of observations, almost all identified to species level, almost all incorrectly or naming the specimens that cannot be identified from that type of photo or cannot be identified from a photo at all. The project admin seems to have enough experience with iNaturalist, but he himself is making same mistakes and the students are making them even more. I have added a plea in comments to not identify organisms to species level if they are not familiar with the organism group, but it did not seem to work.
Yes I am trailing behind you on those, and following your lead where the ID needs pushing to the better side. I would presume, since they won a contest to visit Antarctica (starting out of Cape Town and triggering iNat’s Geomodel anomalies for me ;~), that they are scientists. But perhaps physical oceanography not biology?
What good does a project head do if he’s not heading the project? I know of another project where neither of the project managers has even logged in since 2023, but they still have their students upload. No one responds to my messages informing them of issues with the observations.
It seems that the worst run projects are always the ones where the project creator doesn’t use the site, and some of these can’t be contacted.
As to how it would help to flag projects. One way it could help would be allowing observations to be uploaded to flagged projects but having them default to Casual instead of Needs ID. That might solve many of the issues. It keeps all observations in the same place for ID purposes, it allows the students to upload, but it doesn’t get in the way of the rest of the observations which may have had a little more effort put into the observation. In this scenario, the teacher could get the flag lifted by getting on the site and commenting on the flag.
Judging from the information, they are more likely students. The project admin is apparently a teacher, young researcher with low publication track who recently had switched from biochemistry to ecology…
And it’s only about four and a half months till the 2025 City Nature Challenge. I know the global organizers remind the local organizers again and again to focus efforts on wild organisms, but that message isn’t always received by the even more local teachers and observers. At least for the CNC, projects must be set up well ahead of time (January, I think?), so we could send the project organizers a message asking them to focus on wild organisms, how to tell wild from cultivated/captive, and to please add an initial ID upon uploading.
But I bet it won’t help much. And people wonder why active identifiers just mark potted plants as cultivated without giving any ID, or just ID green stuff as Plants without even identifying to Dicot/Conifer/Fern, much less to family, or just give up on identifying anything except observations from experienced naturalists who understand how iNat works.
Darn it! I see that lots of the students have indeed deleted their accounts (and hence, deleted the ID’s that loads of folks had added to their sometimes good observations).
My lesson here – when I reach out to the profs/teachers, I’ll echo the sentiment of “don’t delete the project!” The educator guide is really quite good – I guess all we can do is guide teachers to that and encourage them with some of the good observations being made.
