At our institute we are considering how we can enable students to use Prolific for their theses. Of course, everyone has the possibility to create their own account and use their own money, but we would like to use extra money provided by the institute for students.
Therefore, we would use the team function of Prolific. The problem is that there is no technical way to prevent team members from starting as many studies as they want and thus, of course, accidentally wasting money. Therefore, I think it would be desirable to have a role in the teams that is able to view and create studies, but not to start them.
Alternatively, it would be possible to secure oneself with some legal agreements, but I would prefer a technical solution, and it would be of interest to all Prolific users.
I was looking forward to the teams element, for a similar reason to yours. But as it stands, the teams component solves a problem no one had
What is needed is the ability to send money from a central account to subsidiary accounts, and to have team logins.
That way
A supervisor would have an account with funds as now
Students could create accounts, with the supervisor as a member
The supervisor could send a fixed budget to the student account
Then the budgeting problem is solved, and the supervisor can help with project creation etc.
My work around, because the prolific part is usually so straightforward, is to get students to set up their questionnaires in Qualtrics and document the prolific side in a text document (N, balanced etc), then I just just set up and run the prolific piece. Also allows double checking the trickier parts of a study, like that the IDs get stored, the right Qualtrics is pointed too, the Qualtrics points back to the right project etc.
