About ATE Central

ATE Central is a freely available online portal and collection of materials and services that highlight the work of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects and centers. These National Science Foundation funded initiatives work with educators from two-year colleges to develop and implement ideas for improving the skills of technicians and the educators who teach them. ATE Central is designed to help educators, students, and the general public to learn about, and use materials from, the entire depth and breadth of the Advanced Technological Education program.

ATE Central helps direct users to a full range of high-impact ATE resources available online, including curricula, learning objects, and podcasts. The portal aggregates information about the materials developed by ATE centers and projects, and organizes them using subject taxonomies, context appropriate keywords, and other digital cataloging techniques.

ATE Central builds on the work of the ATERC Network, which previously linked eleven ATE Resource Centers. It also fully connects ATE with the Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER), a portal of free educational resources and services built specifically for use by instructors at community and technical colleges and part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). ATE Central and AMSER both draw from a single underlying resource database, so the two projects are closely linked, and resources cataloged in ATE Central automatically become listed with AMSER and the NSDL. Both ATE Central and AMSER are funded by the National Science Foundation and are created and maintained by Internet Scout, a research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.