How to do a Field course while the covid19 pandemic is still raging?
Some people at STRI have taken the challenge! Daniel Medina and Rosannette Quesada have all my praise for taking the lead in making this 2-week-long course to happen, even if online, after a a hiatus of one year in the traditional Gigante Course.
I volunteered to lead a student project, and ended up deciding to use iNaturalist as the tool to connect students living across Panama. We created a project to record observations of insect flower visitors, learnt to upload observations and to export data for a project to do a simple test of insect preference for flower colors.
In addition to the teaching experience, it was one more opportunity to test ideas on how to use the data in the platform!
Screenshot of the project home page in iNaturalist, showing student observations.