For educators using iNaturalist in our courses, it would be helpful to easily download a list of our students’ identifications in addition to their observations.
I understand that a popular request is to be able to download lists of identifications; from what I can see this feature has not been deployed so I am reintroducing the question.
In my case, I have a term assignment for students that includes a minimum number of observations and a minimum number of identifications. The identification component is important for instilling the value and creating the habit of giving back to the iNat community. Searching for and determining observations that the students feel comfortable identifying also gives them practice in seeing the data submitted by other users, how they can find relevant data using the search functions, and promotes critical thinking in their research to determine the correct identification.
I’d prefer not to visit the profiles of ~30 students and scroll through their identification lists to count the number they provided throughout the prescribed semester-long time window. Instead, I would appreciate a feature that allows each user to download a .csv of their own identifications. I’ve included an annotated screencap illustrating what a way this function could be easily incorporated into the filter search window; thankfully I’m not the one who would need to figure out a way to make it work – I appreciate any time y’all expend to try to accommodate this request!
The only problem is that using taxon_id=48460 for “Life” doesn’t appear to work; you could only look at kingdoms. But with 50 IDs per page, you could easily see how many IDs a student has. You could also have a requirement that a certain fraction be improving/leading and not just supporting.
this particular endpoint currently won’t return more than 10 records. so if you have more than 10 students, you’ll have to make multiple requests, where each request will get up to 10 of your students.
identifications may be recorded with the login of identifier at the time of the identification. so if anyone changes their user login, you’ll have to search by all variants of their login names. compare:
It sounds like you’re being very conscientious about reviewing your students’ IDs (which is great!), so this isn’t a criticism. And I agree that identifying is a big part of iNaturalist and key to understanding how the platform works, so learning to be a good IDer is definitely a good goal.
However, I do want to note that the general recommendation for class projects is to not make a serious requirement for identifications in most circumstances. In the past, class projects with required identifications have lead to some bad situations with students adding mass low quality IDs to reach a required number (like by just agreeing a bunch) or to adding confirming IDs to classmates’ observations. These situations have resulted in a lot of work to clean up. It’s a similar situation to not requiring a large/set number of RG observations.
Thanks! I think this ( https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-excel-api/22378 would do it. Now I just need to figure out what an API is… I might go with a clunkier, less elegant option until I do.
~Luddite by age and aptitude, not attitude
