iNaturalist teacher functionality

[Curtis Eckerman]

I originally wrote a detailed post about what I would like to see in iNaturalist as a teacher but after it reached 6 pages I figured no one would really read it so it will be better if I kept it shorter.

I have worked through a variety of threads here regarding iNaturalist in the classroom because I am one of the teachers that uses iNat a lot in my classroom (I teach a general biology II course in a college setting).  I want to outline here what I think the problem is and my own suggestion of how it should be handled (which will probably look something like many of you have suggested).

I should mention that I have been using this in my class for over a year and a half and I get great feedback from the students on iNaturalist in particular.  I believe that in general the experience has been great for both the student and myself but I also get frustrated with certain things about its use because of certain limitations.

Problems I have as a teacher trying to run iNaturalist in my classroom:

• I don't have the ability to go and directly manipulate the student's observation.  This is the number one problem.  I can give feedback, I can ask them to change something, I can tie the quality of the observation to a grade and I can even threaten them with negative consequences but in the end I cannot do it for them.  On one hand this is good because I shouldn't have to do it for them but on the other hand it ends up being bad data if it doesn't get fixed.  If you have ever taught a group of students you will know that most of them will try to do what you ask/tell them to do but there is a group of them that just don't care and in a college setting once they are out the door I will probably never see them again.  I am mentioning this because I have noticed that a number of posters have tended to blame the bad data on the teachers and not the student (I do know there there are bad teachers as well).  As the teacher I am trying to teach them how to use iNaturalist and at the same time appreciate the biodiversity around them but there is a limit (as of now) to how much curation I can do.  As a teacher I simply don't have enough tools in iNat yet to curate these observations as much as I and the community would want me to.  Some may say "then don't use iNaturalist" but I would argue that despite its limitations it is still the best way I have found to connect students to organisms.  I should also note that a teacher does not have to be an expert in identification to make this work.  All the teacher needs is an understanding of the kind of observation that the community can work with.  That is the beauty of iNaturalist anyway.
  
• Students agreeing with each other's IDs.  I don't think I have to detail this one much because it has been mentioned many times.  As a teacher I can negate this somewhat by making sure I go over their observations and either agreeing or disagreeing with the ID.  One dissenting opinion will take it out of the research grade quickly enough.  While this is not as big a problem as the first one I listed it is still a time sink and requires a higher degree of vigilance.
  
• Email. This isn't really a problem for my students in college because they are old enough but I have hesitated in helping my local middle schools and high schools set up iNaturalist in the classroom because of the reasons listed above and because there is no controls on emails.  I trust the iNaturalist community implicitly but there will be plenty of teachers and parents who will not like this for their child because of lack of oversight on emails.  I would deem this to be a smaller problem but one that could easily but a much larger problem for someone else.
  

Solutions I would like to see:

I can see a solution taking one of two forms.

1. Classroom account option.  The features I would like to see in a classroom account would be 1) to have all students and teachers in the same account with everyone accessing the account with their own credentials, 2) account limitations set by the teacher (limits on email, their ability to agree with each other's ID, etc..), and 3) the students ability to break away from the classroom account with their observations once they are done with the class.  This type of solution, if not exact, has been mentioned many times by others and I think it is worth going over why I would want this as a teacher.  By having an account that incorporates my whole classroom then I would be able to adjust images, data, time, etc. when the student fails to do so, I could limit students access to email if necessary, and I would have a much greater control over what observations made it out to the wider community thus giving me much greater curation.
2. Mentor access option.  Another, perhaps easier, solution is to have an option in an account that would allow you to appoint someone else (or even several people) as a "mentor".  That mentor could help fix observations and even remove bad ones but would not have access to the other account features of the individual.  I actually see this option as being very powerful even outside of the classroom allowing someone to mentor a friend or someone who just wants to get started.  This would not address the email access issue but given the right settings could go a long way in helping a teacher (or anyone else for that matter) curate their students observations and help clean up bad observations.
   

I know that there other issues I haven't addressed but these are the big ones I see as a classroom user.  I am also refining my use of iNaturalist every semester to try and cut down on bad observations and I think I have made quite a few strides bad data will continue to happen despite my best efforts to prevent it.

Thanks for reading,

Curtis Eckerman (@cmeckerman)

[Charlie Hohn]

Thank you, this is helpful! Can you elaborate on the email issue? I don't understand what you mean

[Jon Sullivan]

Nice.  Good points.

Down here in New Zealand, I've been recommending that teachers set up one class account and all their students use it, but I'm aware that this is not ideal. Your classroom account option sounds great!

(I can also imagine it would be a complicated thing for the iNat developers to build and maintain.)

Cheers,

Jon

[bouteloua]

"but after it reached 6 pages I figured no one would really read it so it will be better if I kept it shorter."

You underestimate us. : ) If there's more, I think you should feel free to share whatever length of potentially helpful information that you have.

cassi

[Curtis Eckerman]

The email issue is one of parental control.  Once you have an account in iNat there are no parental controls to limit the communication a minor can have in iNaturalist.  As I mentioned above for me this is not an issue because the students in my class are not minors but in secondary education some teachers and parents have had reservations about using iNat because of the lack of parental controls on emails.  Now you and I both know that the iNat community is very trustworthy and you can't email outside of iNat but I threw that in because it does seem to be an issue for some people. 

Here is a specific review of iNaturalist that mentions this issue.  https://www.commonsensemedia.org/website-reviews/inaturalist

Curtis Eckerman

[Charlie Hohn]

oooh... you mean the private messages. I guess I never thought of them as email, but yeah that makes sense.I can see how it would be an issue for grade school/high school kids. I can't think of ways to deal with that other than having a separate sort of account, you can have people state their age but everyone just lies.

[Curtis Eckerman]

Yes, I guess I should use the term "private messages" instead of "email".  Ideally a classroom account would allow an instructor to limit the private messaging.  You could have an option for open messaging, no messaging and limited messaging (i.e. only between members of the group).

[bouteloua]

This is probably me being naive, but it's not clear to me why you wouldn't just create the accounts for the students so that you do have access to them for modifying observations if needed or to have access to the private messages if something comes up. Students could change the password to block you out I guess, but that seems like a somewhat extreme scenario.

I do like the idea of a mentor access option and/or some optional limitations of features based on teacher's discretion.

[Tony Iwane]

Thanks for starting this thread, Curtis. Many of these issues have been brought up before, but you've written a nice detailed piece. 

Before making any decisions about school accounts, etc., I'm personally curious as to how teachers use iNat in the classroom. I'd love to hear from educators what the most important aspects (as specifically as possible) of iNat are for their teaching, what they've found their students get out of it, and what are the stumbling blocks they're hitting. Most of us on the admin team aren't teachers (although I have environmental education experience) so direct and specific examples from educators would be really helpful.

Tony

[Sam Kieschnick]

I too appreciate this message, Curtis.  I've had some self-induced headaches by trying to help out students on their observations with varying success...  I've tried my best to get the teachers/professors to check out the teacher's guide (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/teacher's+guide).  I spammed lots and lots of observations with the "welcome to iNat, please read the getting started page., etc..."

I've also interacted with the students that REALLY get into this sort of thing and continue to use it well after the class is over.  These are major 'wins' and worthy of each headache that I've made for myself!

I've suggested to a class to just have a single username and password, but that can easily be manipulated by one person that wants to cause trouble.  Other teachers have used group usernames for multiple folks...

Anyways, I've not got much to add to this, but I really do appreciate you bringing this up!  I try my best to help out students because this tool of iNat can have a really wonderful change in a young person's (or older person's!) life.

[Curtis Eckerman]

I will try to give you a look into how I use iNaturalist below but I do want to shout out to Sam here because part of the experience that students have really enjoyed has been the interaction with the community and all of my students know sambiology because he is great with giving them tips and just helping with identifications.

How I use iNaturalist

I teach a general biology II course that has the title of "structure and function of organisms".  The course covers the evolution and biodiversity of prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants and animals.  I have 5 units and I cover big topic areas in each unit and the iNaturalist project I use focuses on those organisms important to that particular unit.  This means that as the students are looking for these organisms in their own environment we are talking about them in class and so this reinforces the learning.  So my iNaturalist project is a semester-long project and I have attached it (it will change a bit next semester but you will get the idea easily enough).  Here is a breakdown of the 5 parts of the project:

• Unit 1 (Introduction) - Make an iNat account, learn its features and make 20 observations of any organisms
  
• Unit 2 (Protists) - Students have to make 10 "protist" observations.  I use protist in quotation marks because it isn't a great taxonomic grouping and it morphed into 10 "microscopic pond organisms".
  
• Unit 3 (Plants) - Students make 50 plant observations and 10 fungi observations
  
• Unit 4 (Inverts) - Students make 50 invertebrate observations
  
• Unit 5 (Verts) - Students make 30 vertebrate observations
  

Even though these are broken down into units if they observed organisms ahead of time it will count in the particular unit.  For example, if they observed a frog during unit 1 and put it on iNat then it will be counted when we get to unit 5.  This is to encourage them to focus on a group of organisms but also record everything else they see as well.  I also take the students on 3-4 field trips during lab time where they can also focus on iNat observations.

We collect all of these observations in a project and as you will see this isn't insignificant.  The class has over 10,000 observations already (covering 2 semesters and 5 classes).  Here is the link to the project:  https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/acc-biol-1407-class-biodiversity-project-eckerman 

Why I use iNaturalist

I have taught many different courses and my favorite course was always the field ecology course I taught while in Iowa.  It was a lot of fun to take students out to nearby parks to see the organisms that are around them all the time.  The students were always amazed at the creatures they encountered.  This was always fun but also a little concerning because I have always argued that people today know more about the African wildlife than any other generation because of shows like Animal Planet, Discovery, Nature, etc. but know the least amount about what is in their own backyard.  I am concerned because how can we get people to care about environmental issues if they don't care about what is around them?

To that end I have been looking for a way to connect students to their environment in meaningful ways.  In my current class I can take the students on a few field trips, which they like very much, but I am also looking to give them tools to appreciate nature beyond this course.  This is why I use iNaturalist.  It is a meaningful way to connect them to nature while using the technology that they are familiar with.  At first students are a little scared by iNaturalist but at the end of the semester they are concerned that other classes aren't using it because they feel that they aren't getting the same level of exposure to biology.

Beyond my own passion for nature and biodiversity iNaturalist is just a great teaching tool in general.  Any activity that can engage a student, can be used in and outside of class, involves the community at large and generates real data is something I think any teacher would use in any field.  

Student Feedback

I have started getting student feedback on what they thought of iNaturalist because I want to share it with other faculty to show them the potential of adding citizen science to their own courses.  I think it would be valuable to share some of that feedback here.

"I think iNaturalist project is a good way for us to get out there and observe what's around us more.  Most of the time, we don't really pay attention to small bugs or catch protists and insects, but iNaturalist project showed me that there are a lot of diversity out there and it made me more aware.  Now, I think I pay attention to insects, plants, animals more than I used to before the iNaturalist project.  I think this project is an awesome way to learn, and it is a valuable addition to this course.  In the beginning of the semester I didn't really care a whole lot for this project, because I wasn't all that interested in insects, plants, and animals.  Now that we are at the end of the semester, I really think this project has changed my perspective on them in a much better way, and they are a lot more interesting to me now than before."

"I liked that we had different iNaturalist projects throughout the semester. I thought what was asked of us was tough, but not too tough to achieve. INaturalist was a huge part of why I think so highly of this course."

"iNaturalist made me feel like I was doing investigative biology.  It's a really interesting project and it’s made the material covered more hands on. It forces you to prove you are able to distinguish between specimen by providing observations/evidence. Some is the required numbers observations for different taxa were difficult. At the beginning of the semester I felt intimidated by the project because it was really out of the ordinary. I’ve said this before, I really didn’t expect to be doing field studying but I’m glad I had the opportunity to. Right now I feel less intimidated."

"I 100% loved the iNatualist project. I think the "hands on" aspect of the project forced me to really look at the environment around me and vast amount of species that have just become part of the background noise. It opened up the entirety of the ecology around me and connected me to the world of biology, figuratively and quite literally (shout out to sambiology). Seriously, an amazing feat to pull people out of their day to day and to look around.  

The only thing I didn't like about the project was the numbers. I know that there are a lot of species available but 50 plants is a whole lot. Regardless, it made me really look at nature around me and to separate the trees from the forest, so to speak.  

At first I thought it would be more fun to work on, but it's a lot of work to take photos, upload, and catalog 200 species as an amateur. I feel like it's worth it, but it's a lot of work."

"I really enjoyed this project!! It made me appreciate nature so much more, which is saying something because I used to hate nature. It gave me something fun to do with my mom on the weekends. We would go hiking and both be looking everywhere for interesting plants, animals, and bugs to photograph. Just witnessing the diversity of life was my favorite part.  

At the beginning of the semester it did not sound appealing to me at all, but know I'm so glad you assigned it because it really has been a lot of fun."

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[Curtis Eckerman]

To bouteloua's point about creating an account for the students.  This seems like a reasonable idea but I had 72 students this semester in my courses that used iNat and while it wouldn't be impossible to do it seems a little daunting.  But I do want to indicate that I do like this idea if I don't have other options.  I will probably consider doing this next semester.

Curtis Eckerman

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 1:05 PM, bouteloua <cassi...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is probably me being naive, but it's not clear to me why you wouldn't just create the accounts for the students so that you do have access to them for modifying observations if needed or to have access to the private messages if something comes up. Students could change the password to block you out I guess, but that seems like a somewhat extreme scenario.

I do like the idea of a mentor access option and/or some optional limitations of features based on teacher's discretion.

--

[bouteloua]

What a great curriculum and resource for others, Curtis. Thanks for sharing.

[Tony Iwane]

Hi Curtis,

Wow, you went above and beyond the call of duty with that response. Really loving the curriculum you have there and the quotes from the students are fantastic - you've obviously engaged them well. And yes, Sam is an awesome helper and advocate for iNat. The only feedback I have is to make sure the "protist" observation locations are for where the sample was taken and not the labs - looks like a lot of them are located in buildings. Apologies if the samples were taken there as well. But that's the only nit I see fit to pick. Fantastic stuff.

Curious to see how other educators use iNat, especially with younger students.

Tony

[GanCW]

Hi Curtis,

Wow that is an awesome course that I wish was available to me.  

I think more teacher should consider a similar curriculum structure and the enhancements you proposed are right on and will make it easier to administer the project.

[Whitney Mattila]

This may not help, but maybe one thing that could keep the potential work load down for teachers is for there to be a way to give a general call-out for active and interested observers in an area to help with IDs. I'm not sure what the best way to do that would be, since areas have different levels of participation.

[Charlie Hohn]

Speaking only for myself but also for what i seem to see in others, most people are happy to help studenst if and when the students are putting effort into using the site properly. If they are putting in potted plants, not bothering to map correctly, totally ignoring feedback, posting blurry pictures, etc, they won't get as much of a response. For instance this student posted a blurry picture of an insect (maybe) and every time someone points out that the picture is too blurry they just kept repeating 'GENUS AND SPECIES? WHAT IS IT' and 'IS IT NATIVE' ...  good example of how people should NOT use the site.  (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9053631)

[Sam Kieschnick]

"Be the steward of your class's data" - https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/teacher's+guide

Curtis shows this in exemplary fashion -- he's truly a steward of the class project.  So many times teachers just toss this tool out to the students and force them to use it without proper instruction or guidance.  I wish wish wish that the students wouldn't toss on uncertain ID's for their classmates, and I've chimed in this on many observations.

I do agree that if approached with a project, the ID'ers would be willing to help out, but the teacher/professor should feel a touch of responsibility for the data that these students produce.  

When I give an iNat presentation to a group, I try to watch the location to see who uses the tool -- that way I can chime in, give a touch of guidance, and welcome the naturalist-in-training to the community.

@tiwane, do you think that Curtis's write up of an example curriculum could be added to the Teacher's Guide page (with Curtis's permission, of course)?

[Curtis Eckerman]

In the end I did get most of my student's login information for this semester and I am in the process of going through them and deleting observations that are inappropriate and/or just bad.  This isn't ideal and requires a lot of work here at the end but I think it is the least I can do for the community.  I think for next semester I will make the accounts for them and so I will have access throughout the semester and at the end they can take over the accounts.  I think that will be a better fix for now so that I can be curating throughout the semester.

This also came to mind to me the other day.  I don't think teachers should assign this as something they do with their class unless they are also a user of iNaturalist.  I don't mean they should just have an account but they should be invested in the community themselves and should be posting out of their own passion and love for organisms.  I believe this will connect them to the project, their students, and the community.  This will help a teacher understand the limitations and issues of using such a project online.

Thanks,

Curtis Eckerman

On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 5:34 AM, Janet Wright <beri...@gmail.com> wrote:

I hadn't read the whole thread when I posted the below... I see there is good information in there that addresses much of this, thanks!

On Saturday, December 9, 2017 at 5:31:26 AM UTC-6, Janet Wright wrote:

I really like the idea of having iNaturalist mentors for a class project.  It would help students take the assignment seriously, would make it more likely that they'd learn, and of course would improve the quality of what comes through to iNaturalist.  It's a big job, though.  I also agree with Curtis's request to have greater curation ability for observations that come through his course.

I am relatively new to iNaturalist and am enjoying the information exchange, but it is hard not to be appalled by what happens with some of the educational use... I just got caught up (fooled for a while) in a course project in which there were nearly 15,000 observations submitted, and I suspect 3/4 are garbage in some way... people's dogs, vegetables, 34 "observations" of the same poor bat stuck on a wall (probably mis-identified), deliberate jokes, internet cut and pastes.  You've all seen this kind of thing, I guess. The instructor probably set up this assignment in good faith but didn't anticipate what would happen.  

Does iNaturalist have any helpful guidelines for instructors that would limit this kind of damage, or let them efficiently cull through after the fact and remove bad data?  Curtis, you seem to have pretty good control and I am sure that part of it is that you keep on top of it during the semester, teaching why iNaturalist is valid and valuable and don't just hand it out as a one-off assignment.  What other tips can you give?  I would like to use iNaturalist with a junior naturalist group and want it to be a good experience for all.

[Patrick Alexander]

Hello Curtis,

I've posted a bit about this topic here already, but figure I may as well reiterate. :-) As a non-teacher, I'm approaching this from the other side--so, regarding what the teacher-side interface looks like, I have no particular comments other than it'd be great to implement whatever works best for you & your colleagues!

The main concern on my side is basically how much control I have over the effect instructional use has on my iNaturalist experience. Using iNaturalist is more enjoyable and useful as the average interestingness of the observations I encounter goes up, and student observations are generally not very interesting. So, I want to run into the motivated & capable students who are likely to have a real interest in biodiversity long-term. I don't want to sift through hundreds of inaccurate or merely uninteresting observations to get there, nor do I want those observations blocking me from being able to interact with non-student observations. For instance, if I go to the "identify" interface for plants in El Paso County... there's very little signal, it's mostly noise. From my point of view, there's no longer a venue on iNaturalist to productively interact with observations from that area. I suspect the same is true for many parts of the world where universities are using iNaturalist, and I suspect would be true even if all of the observations involved are entirely accurate and rule-abiding. Even good observations are noise if they aren't interesting. So, a couple of options that might be useful from my point of view:

Have a system that allows student observations to be marked (both the classroom account and mentor options would appear to provide this information) along with an option on my side as to whether I want observations marked "student" to show up in any of the queries I make to iNaturalist. Having the exemplary students get "promoted" to non-student status in some fashion would also be very helpful, since those folks definitely are part of what I want in my iNaturalist experience.

That same kind of marking / muting approach could also be applied to localities. I've done this manually for my area via a user-defined locality. Most student observations would drop out of query results if one could, for instance, specify "don't return any observations within a mile of a university". Most students don't get very far from the classroom... and the ones that do are much more likely to be contributing observations I consider signal, rather than just the usual set of common weeds & cultivated plants on campus.

At the more speculative end, perhaps iNaturalist's automated ID system could be put into play? For instance, if one could choose to mute all observations that autoID is pretty sure are common / boring taxa. How exactly "common / boring taxa" could be defined is an interesting question but something like, "more than 10 observations of the taxon within a one mile radius" would probably catch a lot of the nosie. The observations that make it through that kind of a filter should also be skewed towards signal.

The third user group involved here is whichever researchers are going to be using iNaturalist data outside of iNaturalist. I don't have a good understanding of the interests and needs of that group, but presumably this is where all the bad data that I don't mind sitting around if I don't ever interact with it is going to cause a lot of trouble.

Regards,
Patrick

[Curtis Eckerman]

Patrick, I'm not in disagreement with your observations and concerns because I am coming at this as a teacher only secondarily.  My first concern in iNaturalist is as an iNaturalist user and one who is concerned with the quality of the observations and how it feeds my own interests in different groups of organisms.

Having said that, the issues you list here are certainly not exclusive to classroom projects.  It might be a particular problem in certain areas (e.g. el paso county and plants) but I think your suggestions could be leveled at other areas as well (e.g. some bioblitzes).  

However, I would also make the counter argument that those observations that are "not very interesting" are still needed and important.  First, anyone starting iNaturalist is going to make a lot of common observations and eventually get more selective but those common observations add to the data even if it is considered mundane by many.  I personally believe in more data and my real concern is bad data.  This is why I am trying to have the conversation about how to use this properly in the classroom.

I get it, my approach is not going to be appreciated by everyone but iNaturalist is not an exclusive club and no matter how hard we try there is going to be bad observations and mistakes made.  Perhaps it is not fair to have the community have to bear a large part of the burden of bad data and I would like for that to change but that currently is difficult to do the way it is set up now.  I do agree that a larger part, if not all, of the burden of curating the bad data in a classroom setting should fall on the instructor of the course utilizing it.  As a teacher I am saying that this is a good idea and that I am all for finding ways to make this easier for the student, the teacher and the community at large.

Curtis

[Patrick Alexander]

Hello Curtis,

I agree that, although student use is the primary contributor within the particular subset of iNaturalist I've worked with, the concerns I have about uninteresting observations are certainly not limited to student use of iNaturalist. I've suggested in another thread that a general-purpose "I don't want to see observations from this user" function in iNaturalist would be helpful. One of the aspects of student use of iNaturalist that is different from other users who contribute observations that are not interesting to me--and an issue that would be addressed by having student observations aggregated into a smaller number of iNaturalist accounts, as you've suggested in a multi-user course account--is that courses often involve small numbers of observations per account, and large numbers of accounts. Specifying per-account behavior would be unwieldy in this context. The other sources of uninteresting observations tend to be users who, for whatever reason, enjoy posting very large numbers of observations and would be much more easily addressed through a per-account setting. A setting along the lines of "don't show me observations of species that are already frequently observed in a particular area" would also (at least partially) address the issue I'm concerned with in a fashion that is not specific to student observations.

I also agree that observations that are not interesting to me are valuable. "Interesting to me" is not a criterion that I think has any general applicability to the value of iNaturalist observations, it's just a criterion that is relevant to me in my attempt to interact with iNaturalist in a fashion I find useful and rewarding. For instance, I have no interest in birds and would find a version of iNaturalist in which I had to wade through piles of bird observations to get to the plants I'm interested in rather unfulfilling. Luckily, iNaturalist lets me very easily query observations to sort out the interesting vs. uninteresting observations along that particular axis of variation. Of course, that doesn't mean I think bird observations aren't valuable (although I do sometimes suggest precisely that in jest! :-) ), or that it isn't important for someone out there to be doing quality control on bird observations. They just aren't interesting to me, and performing that quality control function is not a task I am interested in (or, in this case, at all qualified for) performing. There are other axes of variation among observations that I feel the same way about, and one of those axes happens to have a strong correlation with student use of iNaturalist. I would not advocate a system that limits the ability of people to submit observations simply because they are not interesting to me; nor do I think quality control of student observations is unimportant. However, I want to be able to manage my interactions with iNaturalist so that I can participate in the ways that I find rewarding--and, of course, I want the same for instructors, students, etc.

An ideal solution here doesn't create an exclusive club, but also avoids dumping users with different interests and different levels of expertise into kind of one big cafeteria where we don't have much ability to choose the terms of our interactions. That "one big cafeteria" model has some definite advantages from the standpoint of egalitarianism, but the culture of the "one big cafeteria" is inevitably dominated by whichever group has the most members. Groups with smaller membership are likely to find this unappealing and leave the cafeteria for some other venue more suited to their preferences. Basically, I think we want to keep those smaller groups in the cafeteria, but give them good tools to find the right nerd table to sit at. And I think folks with taxonomic expertise, who are clearly important to keep on iNaturalist, are generally going to be in the minority and unlikely to stick around if they don't find that right nerd table to sit at.

Regards,
Patrick

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[paloma]

I feel like we have two entirely different topics going on here. One on Curtis' proposal in his original posting here for "Solutions I Would Like to See" (which I hope get addressed, but maybe only the developers can really address this), and a different topic about making suggestions to make it easier for people to filter observations to make their searches better. Both worthy topics--I'm just wondering if they should continue in the same thread or if both topics would be easier to follow if they were separated. Just a suggestion.

[Patrick Alexander]

My interpretation is that they are the same problem seen from two different angles. Of course, I could be wrong.

[paloma]

I could be wrong, too. There is a new thread called "Not Filter," though, where someone's asked how to exclude something from a search and got an answer right away for how to do it.

[Patrick Alexander]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that one yet, and it does seem to address part of the issue.

[Tony Iwane]

I think we'd be happy to host Curtis's curriculum, if it's OK with him, thanks for the suggestions, Sam. Curtis, would this be OK with you? I also agree with Curtis that teachers should be invested in iNat before using it with their students. I feel like that's something we try to emphasize in the teacher's guide, but maybe it needs to be strengthened.

Tony