Welcome to the Citizen Science Academy!

Registered participants receive an email prior to the first day of class with detailed instructions for setting up an account and accessing your course(s). If you have any questions before then you may direct them to: info@citizenscienceacademy.org

Please ensure that your email is set to accept messages from all chicagobotanic.org addresses, and look in your spam or junk folder for any "missing" messages.  This site is maintained by Budburst and the Citizen Science Academy at the Chicago Botanic Garden: info@budburst.org 

    Available courses

    CSA 521: Using Citizen Science Data in the Classroom

    Self enrolment

    Summer 2020

    Designed for grades 6-12, this course offers a good starting place if you are new to integrating data collection, manipulation, and display as part your citizen-science related instructional activities.  Specific projects will be highlighted in this course, including Project BudBurst, eBird, FrogWatch, Picture Post, and CoCoRaHS.  

    This course assumes a basic familiarity with the concept of citizen science and direct experience with or participation in at least one citizen science project.  Familiarity with using spreadsheets is also helpful.  


    Teaching Phenology and Climate Change

    Self enrolment
    Facilitator: Carolyn Mohr Ed.S. 


    Discover how studying the life cycles of plants (phenology) reveals some consequences of climate change. This month-long, facilitated online course includes tips and activities to help you incorporate an observation-rich citizen science project (Budburst) into your lesson plans. Your students will be able to contribute to a national database and use that data to analyze how their world is changing. This course is listed as "Introduction to Plant Phenology and Climate Change (CT-1213)" by the Colorado School of Mines.