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After months of hard work the ATE Central team is pleased to present our new website!  Highlights include more information about the archiving service, sustainability support, and the upcoming social media and technology survey.  We hope you'll take a look through the site and let us know what you think – we'd love to hear from you about the content as well as the look and feel.

We'll be doing usability testing on the site (as we always do when making major changes to the site) at the American Association of Community Colleges Convention coming up in April in San Antonio.  If you're attending and would like to give us some feedback in person (and join us for cookies and coffee) we'd love to set up a time to get together with you.  You'll learn more about ATE Central and gain some insight into the usability testing process that may be useful in your own work!  To set up a time on April 19th or 20th, please email us at info@atecentral.net.

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Join Nancy Maron, Program Director of Sustainability and Scholarly Communications at ITHAKA S&R, and Rachael Bower, Director and PI of ATE Central, for the second webinar in our spring series. Finding, recruiting and growing the “audience” for your work is a topic members of the ATE community have identified as absolutely critical to ongoing success. For some, this might mean recruiting students to enroll in courses or apply for internships. For others, this may mean convincing instructors and administrators that the curriculum that has been developed is something they should use too. We have some best practices to share with you about understanding and growing your audience, and we want to hear from you, too - we’d love to have some of you share them during the webinar!  The webinar will be on Tuesday, March 10, 2015 at 2:00pm Eastern, and will run for 90 minutes.  Sign up HERE. 

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Founded in 1848, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is the largest general scientific society in the world. The organization engages in a range of science-related activities, including the publication of the peer-reviewed journal Science, which boasts an estimated readership of around one million. This report, which is available for free PDF download, outlines the AAAS’s suggestions for jump-starting undergraduate biology education. The ideas focus on cultivating biological literacy, a student-centered approach to the curriculum, what the process of preparing campuses for upcoming challenges will entail, and the unity of purpose that will be necessary to accomplish the next steps in creating excellent undergraduate biology education. Originally published in 2009, the report still rings true today.

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Community College instructors with an interest in the commercial applications of Bioscience will find much to admire in the Bioscience Industrial Fellowship Project (BIFP). This National Science Foundation-sponsored professional development opportunity provides fellowships for ten high-impact instructors from anywhere in the country to come to North Carolina for a month of training in June 2015. During that time, BIFP fellows will engage in boot camps at three community colleges around the state, in which they will gain hands-on lab experience. They will also shadow workers in twelve different industrial/university hosting facilities. For more information, interested instructors may click here for a six minute video overview of the program. Applications can be found here.

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Community colleges have been using multiple federal grants to build programs for many years. But collaborative efforts between five ATE centers and the Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grants are a fresh approach with big implications for both programs. The Community College Daily and American Association of Community Colleges published an article discussing the partnership. For the article click here.

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Congress has approved the 2015 NSF budget - a $7.344 billion allotment which represents a 2.4% increase over 2014 monies. Jeffrey Mervis provides a good overview in his recent article on the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine website. Of particular interest to the ATE community, the NSF's educational directorate came away with approximately an extra $20 million, to be spent on undergraduate STEM programs and an overhaul of science-oriented graduate programs.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics' report, Women in the Labor Force: A Datebook, which was published in December 2014, is now available here. The report covers such areas as demographic characteristics, educational attainment, occupation and industry, earnings, hours of work, and other interesting comparisons of women in the workforce in 2013 compared to previous years. For ATE projects and centers interested in drawing in more women, the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology, and Science is always a useful resource.

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Follow ATE Central on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all things new at ATE Central and in the ATE Community.

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Want to know which ATE Projects and Centers and ATE partners and collaborators are using Social Media? Check out our ATE Social Media Directory and follow a Project or Center!

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Community College enrollment has dipped slightly in recent years, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. It can be interesting, then, to note which schools are bucking the trends. This report from Community College Week lists the fastest growing community colleges in the country in four enrollment categories, including schools with an enrollment under 2,500 students, schools with an enrollment between 2,500 and 4,999 students, schools that enroll between 5,000 and 9,999 students, and those community colleges that enroll more than 10,000 students.