Education and Professional Outreach for Scientists: Producing and Leveraging EPO Objects for Inquiry-Based Learning

Most Education and Professional Outreach (EPO) by scientists reaches relatively small audiences. Most scientists also see their contributions to K-12 teaching rather limited due to their lack of experience in primary and secondary school education. These limitations remain a major barrier in bridging the gap between science and education, and in optimizing the effectiveness of EPO by scientists. As part of the Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education (ERESE) project, we have started to use web- templates in our EPO creation (http://earthref.org/ERESE). These templates are now being developed into web- based tools and services that will be served from the ERESE website and archived by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). At EarthRef.org these EPO objects can be linked to teaching materials in the ERDA digital archive that can be displayed in a fashion allowing selection based on expert level and file type, in what we dubbed the "resource matrix" view. This is a powerful search mechanism for learners of all levels in which they can pre-screen materials to their own level, while allowing them to venture up to higher expert levels or to explore more simple cases at lower levels. This stimulates inquiry- based learning by permitting as much roaming freedom as possible in a "science-data- based" online environment. The current EarthRef.org and ERESE collections include websites for scientific projects, for classes taught and for expeditions, as well as a wide range of materials including press releases, video footage, science illustrations, interviews, data and diagrams, student reports and lesson plans. This collection is representative for EPO in any STEM discipline and provides much interesting materials that are useful for education. Our main goal is to provide scientists with tools so they can obtain an easy-to-use and highly leveraged outlet for their EPO efforts, where they can reach substantial numbers of learners and educators, and where their materials are archived as enduring resources for re-use by many.