Yeah, i apologize if I seem anti-teacher, i am not at all. I just don’t think the way most teachers/students have used the site works very well (with some notable and important exceptions). There’s been one teacher dumping students on the site (dozens a year, each having dozens of observations) for at least 7 years and during that whole time has only contributed 53 observations! Meanwhile an entire preserve has literally unusable data because of nonsense IDs, things that aren’t mapped properly (because the students were not taught how) and lots of other issues. Of the hundreds of students that were put through that project, I only know of maybe 2 or 3 who stayed on the site after the class ended. And, to the extent that I still do ID help there, i am still sorting through all of them including ones from 2012. But… to be honest i stopped doing ID in a whole mountain range of southern California because I got sick of dealing with this issue.
I suppose one unintended effect of this policy could be teachers using projects less, which might cause more problems versus having them use collection projects to track their students and do data curation. On the other hand, if this stopped 50% of the duress users, it would have a massive positive impact in data quality. I’d be OK with the policy having an override for teachers, contingent on them reading the teachers guide and checking a box that they agree to curate their students’ observations on at least some level.
I’m also open to other ideas but this problem has been going on almost as long as iNat has existed and over all this time no one has come up with a better solution, so to me it seems worth a try.