Assessment of student reactions to iNaturalist use in ethnobotany class

Twenty-one of the twenty-three students in SC/SS 115 Ethnobotany responded to the following prompts on a term end assessment survey:

  • Does the use of iNaturalist belong in the ethnobotany course? Why or why not?
  • If you used iNaturalist, what did you learn from your use of iNaturalist? 
  • Should use of iNaturalist be expanded in future? 
  • Some students do not have smartphones. What should I do with these students when the class is working with iNaturalist?
Two students were absent on the day of the survey.


Of 21 students, 20 students responded that iNaturalist belongs in the ethnobotany course. The one student who responded "no" would later respond "yes" to the question of whether iNaturalist usage should be expanded in future terms. 

When asked why iNaturalist belongs in the course, nine of the twenty-one students responded that the application helped them identify plants. Four students felt that an app about plants belonged in a course about plants. The one student who responded "no" answered this question with "because I just don't."

When asked what they learned from iNaturalist, fifteen of the twenty-one students responded that they learned plant names. A couple noted that they learned to post observations. The student who felt iNaturalist did not belong in ethnobotany answered that they learned "nothing" from iNaturalist.
Only nine of the twenty-three students posted observations during the term, and at least one of those was logging in using a classmate's smartphone. That only 40% of the class were able to make observations is in part a reflection of whether the students have their own smartphone. The course does not have cameras, and integrating camera usage into the course would add considerable material to the course (unloading cameras, uploading photographs, manually setting locations). The ease of use of apps such as iNaturalist on a smartphone are a part of their attraction.


A convenience sample of 30 students in four sections of three of my courses suggests smartphone ownership could be as high as 70% among the students. Students tend to have budget models, however, with limited memory. Phones are often filled up by FaceBook, Instagram, and other memory hungry apps. Thus a student having a phone does not necessarily mean that they can run iNaturalist. And the current generation of students are not going to delete their social media to make room for an app being used in a course. 

The need to make observations in the field are also why holding the class in the computer laboratory is not a useful solution. In the computer laboratory students can engage in identification if they know the plants, but making observations is not possible. 

Thus the only realistic solution is the one I have used the past two terms: have students work in groups built around the one member who has a smartphone. 

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