How to involve citizen scientists in your research

Citizen science is often viewed as crowd science where citizens are employed in labor intensive data collection or in other tedious activities required for complex research. But the advent of MOOCs makes it easy to identify, recruit, and collaborate with talented citizen scientists on any rsearch problem. The MOOC audience provides a highly educated and motivated space to recruit research partners from. I will describe a number of different citizen science projects I have been involved in in the past year which have lead to three publications and a number of ongoing projects. I will illustrate how one can recruit research partners and examine how one can find appropriate projects to collaborate on. Whether you are in need of research collaborators or just assistance in your research projects, recruiting citizen scientists provides a new resource to advance your research agenda. I recommend it as a best practice to everyone. It is a wonderful way to give back to the community, provide broader impacts of your work, and get more research finished.