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Members of the public will be able to run their own experiments, producing data that could be valuable for scholars
Finding participants for research studies is a perennial challenge for academics – but a new online platform developed by the Open University and the BBC promises to take mass participation in science to a new level.
nQuire has been designed to run experiments set up not just by scholars and broadcasters but by members of the public, too, claiming to combine citizen science and enquiry learning – so study participants learn how to design and run their own investigations.
Mike Sharples, emeritus professor of educational technology at the OU, said he expected “colleges, community groups and individuals” as well as academics to run projects on nQuire, which he described as “quite a flexible platform for...