What's New @ SERC

Check out our new front page! After several months of designing and testing, SERC's updated layout is finally live. Explore the new design and enjoy an improved experience finding the resources you're looking for!

Our new Favorites feature allows you to keep track of SERC pages you use frequently. Return to them easily and optionally get emailed when they are updated.  You can even build and share collections of pages.

The new Community Contribution Tool allows educators who use SERC-hosted activities to share their modifications and improvements back to the community.  If you've made an existing activity even better for your students let us all know what you did!

SERC is now on Instagram! Check us out on all the socials:

CLEAN Climate Literacy and Energy Collection

The CLEAN site includes more than 900 ready-to-use resources that have been reviewed by educators and scientists for elementary, secondary and higher education settings. The revamped website features guidance for teaching about climate and energy, including Spanish-language versions, as well as a growing collection of themed STEM Flash e-Newsletters, and a series of webinars, which have been recorded for viewing at your convenience. In addition, guidance is given for culturally-relevant climate literacy teaching and climate mental health, as well as for creating your own NGSS-aligned units, utilizing CLEAN resources. The resources are complimented by the CLEAN Network: a professionally diverse community of climate literacy stakeholders who engage through weekly teleconferences and an active email list.

Cutting Edge Exemplary Collection

The Exemplary Collection showcases the best online teaching activities relevant to NAGT's community of Earth educators as scored by peer review on scientific veracity; alignment of goals, activity, and assessment; pedagogical effectiveness; robustness; and completeness of the Activity Sheet. In 2022, we completed the review of the two-decade legacy of On the Cutting Edge and the collection continues to grow each year as new activities are submitted and reviewed so check back regularly!

New Teaching Computation Using MATLAB Activities Available

Explore our newly peer-reviewed activities from the most recent Teaching Computation Using MATLAB workshop. These activities showcase high-quality teaching with MATLAB. Check out the full exemplary collection and consider submitting your own MATLAB teaching activity for the next round of peer review. Descubre las actividades en Español del Taller Virtual para Educadores: Enseñando Pensamiento Computacional con MATLAB. Estas actividades, revisadas por pares, destacan por su calidad. ¡Consulta la colección y disfruta enseñando con MATLAB!

Search Teach the Earth

The Teach the Earth portal is an entry point for educators in the geosciences and related fields to find a broad array of teaching and learning resources. Consolidating thousands of resources from dozens of independent projects, this NAGT-managed hub provides Earth educators a "one-stop shop" where they can search multiple Earth Education websites for a specific course or activity or browse resources by topic, level, pedagogic strategy, and much more.

EvaluateUR Methods

The EvaluateUR Method provides an online guided evaluation process designed for programs that support research experiences for undergraduates. The core EvaluateUR offering that supports independent summer and academic-year research has been streamlined, and the E-CURE version that supports course-based undergraduate programs now has multiple variants to support different class sizes and durations. Our EvaluateUR-Compete variant is available for undergraduate engineering design competitions. We've also added a set of downloadable metacognitive cards that can be used in a variety of learning contexts.

Facilitating Meetings that Foster Equity and Inclusivity

Explore new resources to help you facilitate meetings that promote equity and inclusivity. Developed with input from National Association of Geoscience (NAGT) facilitators and experts, these pages offer guidance on running inclusive meetings and fostering meaningful dialogue on diversity in the geosciences. Enhance your facilitation skills and contribute to a more inclusive community.

Disciplinary Societies and Community Colleges

Through an NSF funded conference, we convened a virtual workshop series, involving disciplinary societies and two-year college faculty from 11 different disciplines, to develop and begin to implement action plans and networks aimed at expanding collaborations between two-year colleges and disciplinary societies. A culminating workshop report that shares the outcomes is published.

Accelerating Systemic Change Network

The Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN) is a network of individuals and institutions, formed with the goal of more quickly advancing STEM education programs. Our unique approach is to bring together those who are researching systemic change at higher education institutions, with those who are making systemic change happen at their individual institutions. Resources include timely webinars, blog posts and resource collections for supporting pedagogical, curricular, and cultural change in higher education.

New workshop topics and formats from the NAGT Traveling Workshops Program

The Traveling Workshops Program (TWP) brings NAGT's professional development program to you, working with you to customize a workshop to meet your department's, program's, organization's, or group's needs. Workshops are now available in two-day in-person, multi-session virtual, and single-session virtual formats. New workshop topics include inclusive mentoring, supporting TAs, and marketing your geoscience program. All Traveling Workshops include personalized facilitation from experienced leaders, a dedicated, private webspace to keep track of resources and work, and a focus on actionable work, and a collective or individual action plan for moving forward after the workshop.

New Consultancy Playbook from the Bridge to STEM Excellence (BTSE) program

The BTSE project's goal was to accelerate changes in teaching through the formation of a consortium of national professional development organizations. The BTSE consortium organizations filled a needed gap by integrating their respective strategies that support individual faculty in improving their teaching practice and encouraged broader use of evidence-based practices by institutions, departments and programs. To this end, BTSE worked to develop a bridge between institutional efforts to improve instruction and national initiatives offering programmatic support. A full description of the process can be found in the new Consultancy Playbook.

New Navigation Features from Compass

The Compass project is an effort at SERC to help our users find the teaching resources they need more efficiently and effectively. During the last year, we've redesigned the SERC front page to better highlight the breadth of materials. We're engaged in extensive tuning of our search engine, including exploring some under-the-hood generative AI tools to help surface better results for every search. Our popular and powerful Pages You Might Like recommendation section, found at the bottom of most SERC pages, now includes a highlighted featured resource drawn from some of our less visible high quality resources.

Community Contribution Tool

Through a new NSF funded project we've developed a new 'Community Contribution Tool.' After initial testing at the 2024 Earth Educator's Rendezvous we'll be revising this tool, but you can use it today by following the 'Used this activity' near the top of every activity page. This tool provides a way for educators who've used SERC-hosted activities to share their experiences back with the community. Have you modified an activity, combined it with new data, or want to share how it played out with your students?  With this new tool you can document and share those resources and experiences directly through the existing activity page.  Community contributions will be displayed within the original activity page, allowing educators to learn from each other's real-world experiences.

New Project EDDIE Teaching Materials

Project EDDIE (Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration) offers a variety of teaching materials -- from short video tutorials and statistical vignettes to classroom activities -- using large, publicly available datasets to engage students in STEM and improve their quantitative reasoning. The growing collection of teaching modules span topics such as ecology, limnology, geology, hydrology, and environmental sciences. Project EDDIE also helps build the associated professional development needed to ensure effective use of the teaching modules. Browse curricular modules, explore statistical vignettes that support you as you teach common statistical topics, and check out the teaching videos and tutorials collection. Sign up to receive email updates about Project EDDIE. This year, Macrosystems EDDIE modules are being added.

New TREX Lab 6 - Climate Extremes and Impacts on People

In Lab 6, students explore climate extremes in the Arctic regions of Alaska and western Canada, examining their impacts on Indigenous communities and the importance of Indigenous knowledge. The lab involves analyzing climate data, watching informational videos, and using online resources. Completing Lab 5 beforehand is recommended to build on related concepts.

Business And Science: Integrated Curriculum for Sustainability

The Business And Science: Integrated Curriculum for Sustainability (BASICS) team is developing transdisciplinary curriculum modules for undergraduate students that combine STEM and business, with a focus on the wicked problems of sustainability in a global economy. Two modules featuring transdisciplinary learning and approaches are ready for use: The Wicked Problem of Water Quality in the Mississippi River Watershed and The Wicked Problem of an Equitable​ Zero-Waste Circular Economy​. These modules have been piloted, revised, and evaluated for their impact on student knowledge and skills around sustainability. New this year are pages describing instructor use of and experiences with the modules, as well as supplementary exercises that tie the modules into existing disciplinary courses.

Teaching Nanotechnology Across the Undergraduate STEM Curriculum

The Teaching Nanotechnology across the curriculum website serves as an on-ramp to providing the fundamental concepts of nanotechnology education across the STEM curriculum, and is primarily developed for undergraduate instructors. New materials added to the site over the past year include new primers on instruments and methods used in nanotechnology, information about preparing for a career in nanoscience in the Earth and Environmental sciences, including a set of career profiles featuring current nanoscience professionals, resources for K12 nanoscience education, and educational resources from national nanotechnology programs.

The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need, When They Need It

Undergraduate majors in the Earth and environmental sciences also often struggle with effectively applying math in Earth science. This project, The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need, is developing co-curricular modules to support majors-level students on math and statistics concepts relevant to majors-level courses. The math questions and practice problems are drawn from a variety of Earth sciences sub-disciplines, so students have the opportunity to use math within the scientific context on a range of applications. Math classes taken in math departments, while valuable, often fail to give students practice using math in their own subject area and students are often not able to effectively transfer the skills themselves.

Teaching with Investigation and Design in Science

The Teaching with Investigation and Design in Science (TIDeS) project is supporting faculty to develop and implement curricular materials for introductory undergraduate science courses that focus on science investigation and engineering design. The aim of the project is to prepare future teachers by exposing them to discourse-filled, context-rich, inclusive classrooms on the premise that teachers should learn science the way they are expected to teach it. SERC is involved both through support of the rubric-driven curriculum development process, as well as a multi-faceted evaluation making use of qualitative and quantitative methods to assess project objectives.

Ecology at SERC

Check out our new resource page for ecologist educators, featuring a range of links to ecology-related materials. This page includes teaching activities, data-intensive exercises, and other resources designed to enhance classroom and lab instruction. Explore these tools to support effective and engaging ecology education.

Teaching with Geodesy

Through a partnership with the EarthScope Consortium (formerly UNAVCO), this site now reflects the current state of the art in Teaching about Geodesy: the science of accurately measuring the Earth's size, shape, orientation, mass distribution and how these vary with time. The site includes more than 100 teaching activities, videos and supporting resources. They span undergraduate and secondary audiences and include resources for both classroom and field courses. The site is an entry point to Geodesy materials from multiple SERC-hosted projects and includes undergraduate teaching activities previously held on the original UNAVCO site.

Cultural Change in the Geosciences (C-ChanGe)

SERC is leading a new initiative to improve departmental and disciplinary culture in the geosciences under a newly funded grant from the NSF's GOLD-EN program.  The Cultural Change in Geoscience (C-ChanGe) project will work toward a vision of the future where all people at each stage of their career experience academic geoscience as a safe and welcoming environment where they feel empowered to learn and contribute without stifling their identities, and the community recognizes contributions from everyone.

Through intentional professional development, the project will create a corps of faculty change agents empowered to work in their own context to make successive, incremental changes, leading to positive cultural shifts within their home departments with the support of a community of practice made up of local and national peers.  The project will also raise the visibility of the many other groups working towards an inclusive geoscience discipline through a web-based network to support awareness, recognition, and connectivity of national partner projects working on geoscience cultural change.

The project will be soliciting participation from faculty teams who want to be part of the two cohorts of change agents as well as PIs associated with other projects doing this kind of work who are interested in networking opportunities.  Community members can also sign up for an email list to receive information from the project as it becomes available.

Workshop for Early Career Faculty 2025

Join us for NAGT's annual multi-day workshop in a stimulating and resource-rich environment, where you will participate in sessions on topics including effective teaching strategies, course design, establishing a research program in a new setting, working with research students, balancing professional and personal responsibilities, and time management. The Early Career Geoscience Faculty workshop is for faculty in their first three years of a tenure-track or equivalent position, with priority given to applicants entering their second or third years in their position. Participants must have a full-time faculty position at a two-year or four-year college or a university at the time of the workshop and must be in their first three years of full-time teaching or starting a full-time position in the Fall.

Portal for Higher Ed

SERC's For Higher Ed portal provides faculty, program leads, department chairs, and learning centers with direct access to resources that help improve teaching and learning, design courses and programs, create inter-institutional networks, support career paths, and more. Recently updated resources in the portal include Broaden Participation in STEM and Making and Sustaining Institutional Change.