The understanding of the emotions in music has motivated research across diverse areas of knowledge for decades. In the field of computer science, there is a particular interest in developing algorithms to "predict" the emotions in music perceived by or induced to a listener. However, the gathering of reliable "ground truth" data for modeling the emotional content of music poses challenges, since tasks related with annotations of emotions are time consuming, expensive and cognitively demanding due to its inherent subjectivity and its cross-disciplinary nature. Citizen science projects have proven to be a useful approach to solve these types of problems where there is a need for recruiting collaborators for massive scale tasks. We developed a platform for annotating emotional content in musical pieces following a citizen science approach, to benefit not only the researchers, who benefit from the generated dataset, but also the volunteers, who are engaged to collaborate on the research project, not only by providing annotations but also through their self and community-awareness about the emotional perception of the music. Likewise, gamification mechanisms motivate the participants to explore and discover new music based on the emotional content. Preliminary user evaluations showed that the platform design is in line with the motivations of the general public, and that the citizen science approach offers an iterative refinement to enhance the quantity and quality of contributions by involving volunteers in the design process. The usability of the platform was acceptable, although some of the features require improvements.

Online communities (OC) have several applications in the domain of education with a special focus on teacher professional development. The development of OC of teachers enables knowledge exchange, reflection on teacher practice, sharing of educational resources, and emotional support. Nevertheless, several barriers have been found to affect community members' participation such as their time constraints due to teachers' busy schedules, the community moderation and social support, and their peripheral participation. This research aims to better understand teachers' initial motivations to participate in such OCs, and how useful is this information to tackle and reduce the barriers that affect their participation. We present how a supporting platform for an OC of teachers is designed following a design-based research methodology within a pre-service science teacher master course to explore, share, and comment learning designs. We gathered information about 40 preservice teachers' motivations to participate in the OC and their perceptions about the supporting platform. Results suggest that participants' main motivation is to gain knowledge and to use technologies to simplify designing and sharing of learning designs. In contrast, reputation is the least important motivation to participate in such an OC. These results provide valuable information to refine the designed platform as there is a relationship between participants' motivations and the perceived importance of the implemented features of the supporting platform. Further iterations will evaluate the refinements and the usefulness of the implemented features.

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