I’m curious if assignments like this are the reason I’ve been seeing observations that are clearly annuals planted in a flowerbed. I’ve been marking those as cultivated. These are often accompanied by absurd ID suggestions and I noticed at least one group of these observations were made on a college campus.
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Quite often yes, too often students are assigned to use the site and told they must submit x number of records to pass, and then photograph everything in site to get it over as quickly as possible, and simply take the computer vision suggestion.
Check to see if they are assigned to a project for confirmation, although not all instructors set up a formal project framework.
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I’ve seen an unusual number of iNat submissions of turtle species from “duck ponds” on two college campuses in my state, and they seem to all come in around the same time of year. Possibly submitted as part of college class assignments, but I can’t discount other visitors to the ponds who use iNat. I’ve noticed multiple records from different users of what appears to be the same individual turtles (all introduced, btw).
My impression is that most teachers who use iNaturalist as an assignment, like myself, are using it to get the students to engage with their environment and so the identification process is only part of the assignment with the actual observation being the biggest part of that.
I personally use this approach even with biology majors because so many of them are disconnected from nature and part of my job, as I see it, is to try and help them form a connection. I actually really like that so many people help with IDs because this forms a community connection with my students that they wouldn’t get otherwise. When the students see the IDs and the conversations that happen because of their observation they are stimulated to learn something in that moment. This comes out time and time again in their comments and reflections that I have them do.
I agree with just about everyone here that we can’t control the teacher’s intent and should not feel bad for doing what we like to do by identifying observations. Once a teacher becomes familiar with iNaturalist then they will learn the limitations that might be imposed on any assignment and then adjust accordingly.
Trust me, as a teacher who has students adding hundreds of observations, all of your efforts to help with Identification are much appreciated by me and the students.
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absolutely 100% “on-mission” as far as iNat goes :)
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