The Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER)

AMSER Project Highlights 2010:

AMSER (http://amser.org) is a collaborative NSDL Pathways project designed to help meet the needs of community and technical colleges  and forge a link between these communities and NSDL. AMSER, which first received funding as an NSDL Pathways project in 2004 and then Pathway Phase II funding in 2008, consists of a focused metadata repository and a variety of integrated tools and services designed specifically to enhance the learning experience of community and technical college students and the teaching capabilities of instructors at those institutions.

Linking the NSDL to community and technical colleges is of critical importance as these institutions train a significant percentage of our  workforce and often act as a bridge between secondary and  baccalaureate education. Educators from this community are very much  in need of what NSDL and AMSER provide: freely available authoritative  online applied STEM education resources. Although almost half of our  nation’s undergraduate students attend these schools, community and  technical colleges receive only 21% of the monies spent on post- secondary education; enrollment at these institutions is increasing almost exponentially even while state and educational systems face budget cuts and staffing shortages.

During the second year of AMSER Phase II the project continued to build on previous work and strengthening relationships between NSDL and the ATE communities through the expanded ATE Central project (http://atecentral.net). More resources were added  and the range of fields of study targeted was expanded. Collection maintenance and resource record normalization was another important focus of the sixth year of AMSER with staff focusing on making the collection as robust and cohesive as possible based on user feedback. Twitter and Facebook pages were used to increase visibility and the online intercept survey conducted over the full year yielded interesting and helpful feedback for the AMSER staff to build on as the project moves forward.

Please see the attached PDF for more information about activities during the second year of Phase II of the AMSER Pathway project.