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Training update: Three CSCCE multi-week courses coming up later this year!

Registration is now open for our “Fall” cohorts of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), Nurturing Online Communities (NOC), and Project Management for Scientists (PMB)!

These trainings will round out our offerings for 2025. This blog post will give you a sense of who each training is designed for and how they connect to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. We’ve also created a new infographic detailing the impact of CEF on our 350+ CEF graduates and the communities they serve. If you’re considering the course, but need documentation to back up your professional development funding request, hopefully this will help!

If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

The intersection of community engagement and open-source: CSCCE’s Director goes on a “Deep Dive” with CURIOSS

On Thursday, 15 May 2025, CSCCE’s founder and director Lou Woodley joined the Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) community as the invited speaker for one of their regular “Deep Dive” sessions. CURIOSS – also seed-funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – is a community of practice for anyone working in a university or research OSPO (open source program office), and their monthly Deep Dive sessions are opportunities for the community to hear from experts in open science, open research, or academic open source.

Lou’s presentation, which was recorded and you can watch it in full below, highlighted some of CSCCE’s resources and trainings that are directly relevant to the work of open-source leaders and OSPO staff members. She did this by asking (and answering!) five questions, which we’ve briefly summarized below.

If watching Lou’s talk, or browsing this blog post, piques your interest in CSCCE’s work, please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org. We’d be happy to discuss your specific context, and whether our consultancy or training opportunities might benefit your project.

Announcing the first graduates of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program!

In September 2023, we launched the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program – a multi-modular professional development training intended to be completed over the course of approximately two years. We’re delighted to share that two of the participants are now ready to graduate as our first CSCCE-certified STEM community managers!

Congratulations to Erin Conn, Project Director of the SEA Change Community at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Miriam Krause, Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity for the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology!

In this blog post, we’ll share more about Erin and Miriam’s experiences in the program, and how we’re celebrating their accomplishments. If you’re interested in learning more about the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, either as an individual participant or as a financial sponsor, please reach out to training@cscce.org.

Project Management for Scientists – choose the training combo that works best for you!

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the graduation of our first general registration cohort of our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB). They followed in the footsteps of our pilot cohort, which we ran for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grantees at the end of 2024. And we’re excited to announce that the training will be back on our calendar in November/December of this year!

In this blog post, we’ll share a little more about our thinking behind offering PMI (the Mini-workshop, An Introduction to Project Management for Scientists) and PMB as separate but connected trainings, and highlight how these trainings impacted the STEM community, program, and project managers who took them.

If you have any questions about what you read here, please contact training@cscce.org.

“There is a lot of project management advice and resources out there but having a training dedicated to STEM and its unique challenges makes it much more meaningful and immediately valuable.” – PMB24CZI participant

How Canvas LMS supports participation in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program

As we announce a round of updates to our Community Manager Certification Program following the initial two pilot cohorts, we’re also sharing some additional information about how we deliver the program so that it’s consistently a high quality experience for learners.

In a previous post, we pulled back the curtain to describe the stages of going from piloting a training to converting it to a “steady state” offering with all the required internal and documentation and templates, as well as final versions of all learner-facing materials. In this post, we go deeper into one key piece of technical infrastructure that we’ve adopted over the past couple of years: the learning management system, Canvas.

Canvas is a powerful online platform that allows us to curate training materials and share them with our learners in a consistent, recognizable way that looks and feels like all other CSCCE outputs. It also affords the ability for learners to come back later to revisit course materials – something that’s especially useful as we build out a program as interconnected as our certification journey!

So let’s take a look at how we have adopted Canvas – and the ways in which it supports program delivery. If, after reading, you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to training@cscce.org

A behind-the-scenes look at how we take a “pilot” training and consolidate it into its final, “steady state” form

If you’ve been following the growth of CSCCE’s online training program over the past few years, you may have noticed that every time we launch something new, we call it a “pilot.” This is because we know that the “v1” of anything needs feedback and iteration to make it better. But what happens after we pilot something? How do we take a training through to a high-fidelity, steady state version that we can deliver consistently time and again?

In this blog post we pull back the curtain on that process of moving to steady state delivery to make visible some of the less obvious infrastructure work we’ve been engaging in over the past few years. And we explain why we’ve made that investment and how it supports us in continuing to deliver trainings that are engaging, effective – and reproducible!

Updates to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program including a “pay-as-you-go” option!

The CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program launched around 18 months ago with the goal of being THE in-depth, professional development program for STEM community managers.

Since launch, we’ve welcomed almost 30 STEM community managers into the program, delivered 2 go-arounds of our CODE and PBK courses, 15 Mini-workshops, and 4 Quarterly Skills Share sessions. In that time, we’ve also sought regular feedback to understand any modifications we might make to best support our learners. Today we’re sharing some of the updates we’ve made which together provide a more flexible way to enroll, onboard, and pay for the program!

If you have any questions about anything in this post, please reach out to training@cscce.org, or join us on Wednesday, 26 March at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC for our monthly community call. We’ll be sharing a brief overview the program, demo-ing CSCCE’s trainings in Canvas, and holding space for questions about the program.

January/February 2025 Community Call Recap: An update from CSCCE and a community conversation

A big thank you to everyone who joined us at our first community call of 2025. We appreciated the opportunity to share a “big picture” view of how CSCCE’s training, consultancy, and community work is evolving as we pass the 5-year mark of operating as a fiscally-sponsored nonprofit.

We are also grateful to those of you who were able to stay for the second part of the call, where we discussed some of the challenges currently facing the STEM ecosystem. We hope to continue these conversations in Slack and at future community events, so if you were unable to attend this time, we hope you’ll join us in the future.

In this blog post, we recap some of the news Lou, Camille, and Katie shared in the “updates from CSCCE” section of the call.

January’s community call – An update from CSCCE

Happy New Year! CSCCE is now five years old as a STEM nonprofit, and as the year turns we’ve been reflecting internally about where we go next as an organization. At this month’s community call, we’d like to invite you to join the conversation!

On the call, Lou, Katie, and Camille will take a look back at some of the milestones we’ve celebrated so far, and then share some of the big projects that we’ll be focusing on in 2025. Throughout the call, there will be opportunities to share your feedback, and learn how you can participate in CSCCE community programming over the next 12 months.

We hope you’ll join us!

Date: ~~Wednesday, 29 January 2025~~ POSTPONED until Wednesday 19 February 2025

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join

Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)