This paper focuses on an unexplored dimension of Citizen Science: the potential of Volunteer Computing (VC) for informal learning. VC has been one of the most popular forms of Citizen Science since its beginnings in 1997, when the first VC platforms, such as SETI@home, were created. Participation in VC is based on volunteers donating their idle computer resources to contribute to large-scale scientific research. So far, this has often been considered as a rather passive form of participation, compared to other online Citizen Science (or citizen cyberscience) projects, since volunteers are not involved in active data collection, data analysis or project definition. In this paper we present our research, which was conducted in 2013-2014 with the BOINC Community "Alliance Francophone", and demonstrate that some of the volunteers in Distributed Computing research projects are not at all passive. We show that the dynamism of BOINC greatly relies on community-led gamification and that participation may lead to important learning outcomes. These include extending one's scientific interests and network of people who share similar interests, and progressing within the fields of communication, computing and Internet literacy. Also, as demonstrated by our recent ILICS survey research (2015), these latest learning outcomes are experienced by all categories of participants according to their level of engagement irrespective of their level of formal education, which is an interesting finding for lifelong education policies. Altogether, VC projects engage volunteers emotionally, far beyond the simple use of their computer time and power, and may have a personal and educational value. For a minority of very active volunteers, these projects become real "Windows of Opportunity" for making friends, gaining skills and benefiting from new experiences, which would not easily happen otherwise in their normal everyday environment.

Citizen Cyberscience (CCS) projects are online projects that engage participants with no necessary prior scientific experience in online tasks of very varied types and that contribute to the scientific research in different domains. Many research studies confirm the usefulness of CCS projects to researchers while less has been done to explore their added-value for the participants. Specifically, we are interested to know to what extent CCS projects help participants learn while participating through typically small-sized and very specific tasks.We propose in this work to include another source of quantitative data to the research toolbox usually used to evaluate learning in informal learning contexts as the one of citizen science. This data source is learning analytics that makes use of the already very ubiquitous web analytics and that is heavily used in varied online learning environments. Based on our experimentations with two CCS pilot projects, we created a framework to help CCS project designers properly implement learning analytics in their project in order to make the full use of these analytics and integrate them with other sources of quantitative data related to the user experience. We apply the proposed framework to explore the interaction between learning and engagement in two pilot CCS projects of different types: volunteer thinking and gaming. Based on our experience, we conclude with few good practices and recommendations to avoid pitfalls.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract