Workshops and Websites

SERC workshops, both face-to-face and virtual, are widely regarded as some of the most effective that participants have ever experienced, while SERC websites have effectively captured educational expertise of thousands online. Using Serckit to support sharing and synthesis at workshops, we simultaneously increase learning at the workshop and produce a lasting online resource.

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World-Class Workshops

Designed for Impact

The design of a workshop or meeting determines not only the participants view of its success but also the magnitude of its broader impact. Whether focused on improving teaching or developing a consensus study we bring you principles of workshop design grounded in more than 15 years of experience. We facilitate learning using principles from educational research, while balancing the need to attend to practical outcomes with big picture thinking. Formative feedback and workshop evaluation allow you to understand what is working, how things need to be adjusted, and what participants learn and plan to do.

Tangible Workshop Outcomes

Effective workshops produce products and actions. We build products into workshop design using Serckit to collect essays, teaching activities, course descriptions, and/or other resources from participants in advance. Contributed through forms and transformed automatically into web pages, these immediate, practical products form the foundation for discussions and activities that move the group forward and can be made public as an immediate workshop outcome. Discussions and resulting synthesis are documented in real time and are ready for publication immediately afterward. Working groups produce products that transform learning into actions that address participants specific interests, challenges, and context. Action planning can tie this all together, facilitating individuals or groups in moving forward after the workshop.

Active Community

Participants routinely tell us that the most valuable part of their workshop experience is the opportunity to meet and talk with others in their field. Each workshop is designed to help participants make connections, keep them, and use them. We start before the workshop to ensure that participants have insight into the expertise and ideas that others are bringing to the workshop, facilitate both formal and informal interaction during the workshop, and provide tools for ongoing communication and sharing after the workshop. The workshop website creates an enduring hub of information that participants can return to while email lists, workspaces, and discussion tools support ongoing collaborative work.

Award-Winning Websites

Expert Website Development

SERC works with project teams and communities to transform their energy and expertise into polished, professional websites that reach broad audiences. Our online platform, Serckit, supports easy collaborative authoring and is purposefully built to meet the needs of education projects. It supports peer-review of content and facilitates measurement of community engagement. But our approach goes well beyond a tool. Our expert staff shepherds each project through a design and development process that is informed by our experiences working with busy educators on more than 100 successful projects.

Education Resource Collections

Our websites are known for their richly searchable collections of teaching resources. Our templates and contribution tools make it simple to collect and display resources: program designs, course descriptions, teaching methods, data sets and more. These can be easily arranged into searchable collections organized by topic and educationally-aligned themes. New collections can draw from our existing resource library, making it simple to jump-start collections that address new audiences or themes.

Broader Dissemination

Hosting a website at SERC allows projects to get more bang for their dissemination buck. Our system makes resources discoverable across other SERC-hosted sites, where they are topically or pedagogically relevant. Large scale portals, cross-project collections, integrated navigation, and a recommender system that links your content to related topics all make resources more visible than they would be on their own, stand-alone website. More than 4 million users visit the SERC-hosted sites each year.

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Websites

There are a range of options for publishing your materials with SERC. Many of our existing partner projects solicit community contributions of materials such as individual teaching activities or program descriptions. If your materials are a match for one of these collections, you may be able to submit directly through forms within the specific project website. See our Join the Community page for more details.

There are also opportunities to contribute larger suites of materials to our existing project sites. For instance our Pedagogy in Action project documents student-centered pedagogies. If you have a pedagogy you'd like to add to the collection we can work with you to develop a new area within this site. There are a range of opportunities like this across our existing projects; places you can gain exposure for your curriculum or other content within the context of an existing site. There is a base cost for this sort of larger effort that varies depending on project structure and scope.

We can also work with your project to develop a new website that features your materials. We'll work with you to conceptualize and design a site that highlights your project. We'll also integrate your materials across the larger suite of SERC-hosted sites; ensuring that your project reaches the right audiences. A custom project site can leverage both the full suite of tools available through our Serckit platform, as well as the deep experience of the SERC staff in developing education websiteWe have the capacity and experience to handle your largest project and charge a base per year cost for smaller sites that scales with project size.

Contact us to talk about your site »

Workshops

SERC has years of experience in running events that range from one-day workshops to week-long conferences to ongoing webinar series. Each event is paired with an integrated website to streamline registration, logistics, content generation, and workshop outcomes. Many of the resources currently hosted on the SERC sites were generated at workshops.

The basic workshop budget includes access to Serckit, registration and payment form functions, and minimum Webteam support time. For groups who have worked with us in the past and are familiar with Serckit, a basic workshop website package is required and at a reduced cost from the SERC Webteam support package (see below).

For new collaborators or those who would like more, additional support is available:

The SERC Webteam: A Webteam support person will familiarize you with Serckit, provide expertise on effective web design, and facilitate use of the workspace to help you generate high-quality workshop products. Webteam support is an absolute must for first-time collaborators and those learning how to use Serckit. Budgets for this sort of full support typically start around double the basic workshop budget (see above).
Post-workshop materials development: We can work with you to develop content-rich, public web pages built from materials developed at your workshop. These resources greatly increase the impact of any given event by making the results of the workshop available to all, not just those who were lucky enough to attend. Post-workshop support from SERC could include ongoing assistance for teams working collaboratively in Serckit, help with proposal writing, white papers, community building, or planning your next workshop.
Logistical support: Take advantage of our expertise and experience in hosting workshops, and let us handle participant registration, accommodations, catering, and on-site logistics for face-to-face workshops. Going virtual? Let us set up video-conferencing and video content for webinars or fully interactive, virtual workshops.