The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology's (IRIS) Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program is committed to advancing awareness and understanding of seismology and geophysics while also inspiring careers in the earth sciences. To achieve this mission, the IRIS EPO program combines the content expertise of the consortium membership with the educational and outreach expertise of IRIS staff members to create programs, products, and services that target a range of audiences, including students and teachers in grades six through 12, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and the general public. Since 1998, the IRIS EPO program has produced a portfolio of freely available products and services and offers a rich repository for anyone who teaches seismology-related topics and/or communicates seismology research to the general public.
For some educators, restrictions imposed by COVID-19 created space for innovation and affirmed the value of online tools and learning environments for increasing access to and engagement with science.
To today's budding scientists, the notion of sharing experiences and working collaboratively with distant peers is not a novelty. Instead, this is what most young scientists expect to achieve through the Internet portals they carry in their pockets and backpacks. They have never known a world without information and communication technologies (ICT) such as laptops, mobile phones, text messaging, and the Internet. As a result, they have grown to rely on uninterrupted access to the Internet for a range of information‐gathering and communication activities. Further, this generation of students has fully embraced structured online learning opportunities. For example, in 2011 more than 6.7 million U.S. students in higher education took at least one online course [Allen and Seaman, 2013].
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.