The Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER)

AMSER Project Highlights 2009:

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.

Year one of the second phase of AMSER saw expansion of the project as new resources and collections were integrated, new services created,  and features upgraded. User input at workshops and data from surveys  provided staff with feedback that helped optimize services to better  match user needs and influenced resource selection in a variety of  fields of study. Outreach activities, workshops, and presentations  were carried out (list in PDF attached to this overview) and  collaboration with the NSDL community and the Resource Center continued to enhance the project. In addition ATE Central (http://atecentral.net ), a sister project to AMSER, was funded, bringing more resources from  the NSF Advanced Technological Education projects and centers into AMSER and the NSDL.

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