Welcome to the Education Public Access Resource Center (Ed-PARC) website. Ed-PARC is one of three Public Access Resource Centers established within the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC)
The essence of a Public Access Resource Center is education ... in the broadest interpretation of that function. Ed-PARC is committed to creating new knowledge useful to the K-12 Education community and disseminating it as widely as possible, using modern communications technologies to their fullest. The users of our products are students, whether or not they fit a formal definition based on regular attendance in a classroom.
Two major objectives that Ed-PARC intends to accomplish are:
- to unify K-12 teachers, educators of science teachers and scientists into an Earth System Science team committed to serving a continuum of information customers and
- to develop education modules and curricula for K-12 classes that have applicability to the broader categories of student we have defined.
At the core of the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium's (UMAC) organization are three User Councils: K-12 Education, Agriculture and Natural Resources. End users with varied perspectives (teachers for Ed-PARC; farmers and ranchers for AgPARC; and foresters, agency officials and environmental organization personnel for NRPARC) are represented on all three, as are the five UMAC states (ID, MT, ND, SD, WY). The councils meet electronically, via teleconferences, and face-to-face at least once per year. From their focus-group discussions, plans are developed concerning which services and products to prototype and how to deliver them; the plans are thereafter continually updated. Widespread adoption by end users requires their active participation during development as equals with the academic scientists and educators.
