1. AVC User Communities

2. The Educational Communities
The AVC leveraged a number of existing educational communities.
Eastern Illinois University (EIU) has a Masters of Science in Natural Science (MSNS) program. The K-12 teachers in the MSNS program became involved in:
creating educational material,
rubric development,
classroom testing / educational reviews,
workshop testing, and
thesis use of the AVC.

3. The Educational Communities
Graduates at University of Utah became involved with developing visualization and analysis tools, which also resulted in thesis use of the AVC.
EIU physics classes tested using data with AVC visualization tools at an undergraduate level.

4. Partnerships Effecting AVC User and Developer Communities
The NSDL Communication Portal offers tools for collaborative development efforts.
The DLESE Community Review System offers a good tool for collecting recruited reviews.

5. The Research Community
The AVC involved a Department of Energy research community. Including such this community resulted in numerous benefits:
data sets,
visualization tools,
analysis tools, and
scientific reviews.

6. Conference Workshops AVC workshops played multiple roles:
introducing users to the AVC content,
demonstrating how to contribute content,
formation of teams for collaborative development,
training users to review educational material, and
supplying basic usability information.
Initial workshops at local and national conferences were aimed at various educational levels. Later workshops focused on the most active community, the middle school teachers.

7. Outreach with CDs
Teachers requested CDs as an offline means of accessing AVC lesson plans when the internet was unavailable.
These CDs became useful for rapid demonstrations at conferences.
CDs are also a great take home object to remind users to visit the AVC.

8. Reaching International Users
Puerto Rican teachers were translating the AVC Lesson Plans into Spanish, which made it clear translation was a community need.
Unfortunately quality translations are a prohibitive expense.
To encourage international use the AVC used AltaVista's Babelfish, a free automated translation services. This increased AVC use from 10 to 75 countries.
Now the NSDL has international users from over 90 countries.

9. For the Future…
Museum kiosks based on NSDL Collections could offer another means of gaining interest through public outreach.
Collaborating with international research and educational communities to further expand this collection.