TEACH THE EARTH’S DECENTRALIZED MODEL FOR CENTRALIZED EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE DISCOVERY

SERC hosts an extensive suite of geoscience education materials developed by dozens of NSF-funded projects; these resources comprise tens of thousands of pages and are used by millions of visitors annually. An ongoing challenge is helping users navigate this wealth of resources, especially when topics of interest are addressed across multiple project websites. Portals, such as the National Association of Geoscience Teachers’ (NAGT’s) Teach the Earth site, facilitate search and discovery of resources from multiple projects and offer a possible solution. Portals provide not only a centralized website, but also allow visitors to have a cross-project perspective even when they are deep within an individual project’s website. The latest revision to the Teach the Earth portal, developed collaboratively between the SERC webteam and NAGT, includes a suite of tools to meet this need. Visitors can take advantage of the portal’s structured search and discovery tools regardless of how they enter the resource collection. These tools include traditional full-text search interfaces, theme-based recommendation systems, and cross-project news and events feeds. These cross-portal navigation elements are tied together with a front page that provides search across all the materials and organizes them according to a standard set of thematic categories that span the full range of catalogued geoscience education resources. Discovery of high-quality resources is supported through the exposure of peer-reviewed sub-collections including NAGT’s On the Cutting Edge collections of reviewed teaching activities and geoscience education websites. This new Teach the Earth portal will help streamline discovery of geoscience education resources and allow visitors to discover relevant, high-quality materials no matter where or how they enter the collections.