CSCCE trainings Archives

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.

Nurturing Online Communities (NOC)

Building and nurturing a community in an online environment comes with specific needs and challenges. This seven-week course is designed with community managers of scientific communities of practice in mind, and will explore a variety of social science claims about how people behave in online communities to inform actions that you might take to support increased engagement, commitment, and constructive behavior.

In this seminar-style course, participants will engage with instructors and each other in regular discussions, guided by the course textbook, Building Successful Online Communities by Kraut and Resnick. The course will cover 6 topics related to managing online communities and each week we will review the corresponding chapter of the textbook, focusing on key themes identified by staff, and work together on a case study to apply the concepts. Later the same week, learners will spend a 90-minute Co-Lab working in breakouts on a CSCCE-designed activity to apply a translation of the core concepts to their own community, followed by a debrief.

Our fall offering of Nurturing Online Communities (NOC25F) will run on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning Tuesday, 30 September until Friday, 14 November 2025.

The key dates are:

Tuesday lessons: 30 September; 7, 14, 21, 28 October; 4,11 November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*
Friday Co-Labs: 3,10,17, 24, 31 October; 7,14 November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*

*Note that daylight savings may affect the timing of live sessions for those outside the US in the final week two weeks of the course)

Registration deadline: Friday, 5 September, 2025

Project Management for Scientists: A new training course from CSCCE!

We’re excited to end the year by announcing two new trainings in the CSCCE training portfolio that focus on project management – with the opportunity to register for one now and to let us know if you’d be interested in the second!

In early December 2024, we ran a pilot offering of a brand new multi-module training, Project Management for Scientists. We developed the course with funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and piloted it with almost 30 CZI grantees. This training followed a 2-hour long Introduction to Project Management that we ran earlier in October which a larger group of 50 participants attended.

In 2025, we’ll be making both of these trainings more widely available, and in this blog post, we share more about who they’re for and also the different formats they could take.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking the trainings as an individual. Let us know your preferences for a bootcamp vs. a multi-week training, as well as your availability in the first half of 2025, using this short form.

Additionally, if you think your community or organization would benefit from a private cohort of the trainings, you can also let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

Facilitating collaboration and decision-making: A workshop series for the Rare As One Network annual meeting

In mid-May, CSCCE was honored to host a three-day workshop series for the Rare As One Network’s annual meeting. The meeting’s attendees had a shared interest in developing strategies to support large-scale collaboration and collaborative decision-making, topics that we regularly offer trainings on, and we were delighted to share our frameworks in this highly interactive online workshop setting.

This blog post offers a summary of the series. If you are interested in learning more about commissioning a similar training for your organization or community, please reach out to training@www.cscce.org. (Review a full list of workshops in our catalog.)

An update about how we’re using Zoom at CSCCE

This post was authored by CSCCE’s Director of Community, Alycia Crall.

The CSCCE relies on a number of communication platforms to support programming in our community of practice. One of the primary platforms we have adopted is Zoom, and we currently have two Zoom accounts. One that is used for external programming, training, and events. The second is used internally for staff meetings and other communications.

Background on changes to Zoom

In August 2023, Zoom updated their terms of service that suggested they could use meeting audio, video, chat, screen sharing, and other content to train their Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. At CSCCE, we value making our programming accessible in a range of ways AND we want our learners and community members to feel comfortable speaking freely without any concerns for their privacy. Due to privacy concerns, closed captioning was activated on a case by case basis as we examined how our team and community of practice might be impacted by these changes.

How does CSCCE online training impact community managers and their organizations? Read our report to find out!

Thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we recently completed a medium-term evaluation of our foundational training course, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF). We’ve just published a report that summarizes the results of this work, which shows impact across three levels of scale – the individual, their community/organization, and the wider STEM ecosystem.

In this blog post, we’ll recap some of the rationale for the report and a high level overview of our findings. Subsequent posts will share more about our user-centered design approach to creating professional training courses, what we learned about the impact of CEF at each level, and how this work will impact our ongoing training offerings.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

April Community Call Recap – The impact of short-form professional development training in STEM

At this month’s community call, we were talking about the impact of short-form professional development trainings – focusing not only on how individuals use what they learned during a training in their day to day work, but also considering how such trainings may result in changes at the level of the STEM ecosystem by affecting common practices and connecting learners across projects and organizations.

The call included an overview of the Bicycle Principles, a framework for designing and evaluation inclusive and engaging trainings, as well as presentations about two different methods for gathering and analyzing impact.

In this blog post, you’ll find recordings of the three presentations from the call, as well as a brief summary of what each talk focused on. Do join us for our call next month, Wednesday 29 May at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC, when we’ll be taking a closer look at the application and utility of community playbooks (a.k.a. Collaboration guides, lab handbooks, and more). Add to calendar.

Three bicycles stand on a set of concrete steps, with long grass on either side. The bicycle in front is pale blue with white wheels, the one behind is white with black wheels, and the one in back is black with yellow wheels. — What do bicycles have to do with short-form training? Read on to find out! Photo by Solé Bicycles on Unsplash

More than 300 learners have graduated from Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals!

This month we celebrated a very exciting milestone – more than 300 STEM community managers (305, to be exact!) have now successfully completed our foundational training in community management, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF).

Congratulations to all of our graduates – many of whom are featured on this page of our website – and if you’re interested in taking part in the course yourself, registration is open for our fall 2024 cohort (registration deadline: 23 August). But hurry! It’s more than half full already.

“The course provides essential information to support community work whether you are just beginning or seeking to expand your community engagement activities. It provides resources to help you develop a strategy and tools to support implementation of your ideas. This course demystifies many aspects of community engagement and helps to ensure your community is built to last.”
CEF24W participant