NSF Award
2034189
This project will improve the tools and practices that support resource discovery for Earth educators visiting SERC-hosted websites. The Earth education community identified improving discovery as its highest priority action for maximizing the impact of the SERC-held collections of education materials. In addition, we will modify tools in the Serckit platform to allow users of the SERC sites to discover Earth education materials hosted by other organizations. This will increase the visibility of resources from many sources and provide the community with a one-stop portal for finding high quality educational materials. The new search and exploration tools will directly support connecting users to materials that: integrate research-driven pedagogy, prioritize student engagement with current research data, and increase the visibility of the community's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, thereby elevating the spread of these important practices. The investigators will use a systematic, community-informed process to guide the upgrades, ensuring changes lead to increasing impact of the materials and resources.<br/><br/>The investigators will engage in a user-centered design process: a cyclical feedback loop of gathering community input, making targeted improvements and evaluating the results. The focus of this process will be to 1) make iterative improvements to a wide-range of site features intended to improve discovery and 2) expand the range of resources discoverable to include those not directly hosted by SERC. This expanded scope, facilitated by SERC tools for cataloging external resources, will connect the large Earth education audience already on SERC sites to the rich array of resources, projects, and events developed by external Earth education programs including research centers (e.g., UNAVCO, IRIS, UCAR, OOI, CUAHSI) and efforts funded by GEOPAths and NSF INCLUDES. The evaluative part of the design cycle will require developing a deeper understanding of how users engage in discovery with the current site and establishing metrics that characterize how well the modifications and expansion made serve the users.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
