Internet Scout

STEMLink: Integrating STEM Content into Campus Learning Mangament Systems

Monday, April 27th, 2026 - 2:34pm

About STEMLink
For STEM faculty seeking to enhance their courses with high-quality STEM educational materials, ATE Central's STEMLink offers an efficient solution. STEMLink integrates directly into a campus Learning Management System (LMS) and provides access to thousands of applied STEM resources created through the NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. In this Q&A, ATE Central's Edward Almasy shares how STEMLink supports educators by streamlining access to curriculum materials.

STEMLink makes thousands of high-quality applied STEM educational materials created via the NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program available directly within campus learning management system (LMS), for use by educators and students in courses and classrooms. It allows educators to easily leverage the amazing wealth of in-depth expertise, knowledge, and experience brought to the table by ATE grantees, to save them time and improve outcomes for their students.

We created STEMLink for two reasons: 1) increase and widen the impact of ATE-created materials, and 2) provide the creators of those materials with hard data on their usage, that they could then share with NSF and other stakeholders, to help demonstrate the impact of their work.

In service of that second goal, the STEMLink service also serves (aggregate and strictly-anonymized!) usage data back to the ATE community, that they can share and use in their formative evaluation efforts, to help guide their work going forward. The end result is a win/win situation, where curriculum users get a continually-expanding and improving range of materials for use in their classroom, and curriculum creators get a continuous stream of feedback on what STEM educators across the country find useful and valuable.

STEMLink offers three big advantages: 1) STEMLink materials are created by literally some of the best applied STEM educators in the country, 2) those educators often work closely with industry to ensure that the materials they create are aligned with current industry needs so that the knowledge and skills learned will help students land good jobs, and 3) it puts those materials directly into the LMS on your campus, ready for your use. And a fourth significant advantage: STEMLink is all completely free, to you and to your institution.

ATE grantees can also share (and STEM educators can leverage) their applied STEM education expertise in another way, as STEMLink Publishers. STEMLink Publishers create and share curated collections of educational materials focused around particular applied STEM topics, that educators can incorporate as a whole or in part into the courses they're managing and teaching.

Can any campus install STEMLink and are there costs associated with using it?*

STEMLink is entirely free to you and your campus, and can be installed into any LMS running one of the major platforms (Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle) in just a few minutes. There are videos that walk through LMS installation on the STEMLink website.

What's next for STEMLink?

A big focus for us right now is on improving and extending the STEMLink Publisher facilities, to provide more ways for subject experts in the ATE community to share the work they've done in curating and collecting targeted sets of resources to cover a specific topic in the classroom.

But we are continually working to improve the STEMLink interface based on feedback from the community, to make it easier to find and use exactly the right applied STEM materials for your courses, and would very much appreciate any thoughts you might want to share or questions you might have about the service!

STEMLink provides free access to trusted materials that support both teaching and student success. To learn more or bring STEMLink to your campus, contact the ATE Central team at stemlink@atecentral.net.

Metavus 1.2.1 Digital Collection Platform Release

Thursday, July 10th, 2025 - 1:48pm

Version 1.2.1 of the Metavus open-source digital collections platform is now available.

This is primarily a performance optimization and bug fix release, with minor enhancements to EduLink, GoogleMaps, and ChatPDF plugins. The minimum PHP version required by Metavus is now 7.4.

The new version can be downloaded from the Metavus website, or it can be found on GitHub. For any questions or to provide feedback on this new release, please contact us.

Metavus 1.2.0 Digital Collection Platform Released

Monday, April 14th, 2025 - 10:14am

Version 1.2.0 of the Metavus open-source digital collections platform is now available. Three noteworthy additions in this new release include:

ChatPDF: a new plugin that allows ChatGPT to be asked specific questions about files uploaded to a collection, with answers placed in associated metadata fields. ChatPDF can be leveraged to jumpstart cataloging or for other AI-driven explorations. This capability is currently being used to help manage the ATE Central resource collection.
PhotoLibrary/ExifTags/IIIFServer: new plugins that provide support for assembling a photo collection, including automated extraction of embedded information into metadata fields, collection display, and online delivery. This feature is currently being used for the ATE Impacts photo library.
EduLink: a new plugin that allows collection materials to be made available directly within multiple learning management systems (LMSs). As part of the STEMLink service, this capability is currently being used to make NSF ATE-created educational resources available in LMSs across the country.

About Metavus

Metavus is an open-source digital collections platform aimed at helping collect, describe, and disseminate resources online in customizable formats. Key features include:

Fully configurable, extendable schemas and vocabularies for records, collections, events, pages, news, and users, providing unlimited flexibility in describing and managing resources.
Processing and data manipulation rules based on conditions and search parameter sets, supporting total adaptability in modifying and tracking content.
Customizable privileges based on content and user metadata, offering limitless options for granting and controlling access to resources.
Plugin-based architecture, providing unlimited opportunities to expand and enhance ways to ingest, manipulate, and disseminate content.

Metavus 1.2.0 can be downloaded from the Metavus website and can also be found on GitHub.

ATE Central Releases ATE Impacts Book

Thursday, August 22nd, 2024 - 11:59am

ATE Central is excited to inform you about the upcoming release of the new ATE Impacts 2024-2025 book! You can order copies of the ATE Impacts book online - and digital copies of the book can be accessed once available on the ATE Impacts site as well. The digital copies will be viewable across all devices via any web browser.

The ATE Impacts 2024-2025 book showcases the work of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education Community. This edition includes a foreword from National Science Foundation Director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, and features the work of 24 centers and 35 projects across the seven ATE areas, as well as applied research.

By highlighting ATE grantee's successful and innovative work, the book encourages broader participation in the program by academic institutions, educators, and industry partners. Dissemination of the ATE Impacts book advances understanding of the importance of technicians to the strength of high-tech industries that drive the nation's economy.

For 30 years, the NSF's Advanced Technological Education program has improved educators' teaching, broadened students' knowledge, and enhanced technicians' skills. Through the ATE program, NSF has influenced the career paths of individuals from historically underrepresented populations in STEM fields and added diversity—of thought, perspective, and experience—to the technical workforce. The book supports and complements outreach activities conducted by ATE PIs and staff in broadening their audiences and sharing their stories with various partners and stakeholders.

We hope that the digital and print versions of the book will be helpful to those of you within, and beyond the ATE community. Here are some ideas for how you might use copies of the ATE Impacts publication with campus colleagues, your industry partners, students, and others.

Promote STEM Education and the ATE program to deans, department chairs, and other colleagues.
Give students a sense of the depth and breadth of the STEM fields available to them.
Emphasize the long-term benefits of education and industry collaboration by sharing the book with industry partners.
Distribute among new faculty and staff members to help them better understand the outcomes and opportunities offered by NSF and the ATE program.
Showcase the impact of STEM education and ATE by sharing the publication with local journalists, government officials, or campus marketing staff.

We also encourage you to visit the ATE Impacts blog for more stories, statistics, and ATE-related content. If you have any questions or feedback, please email us at info@ateimpacts.net, or visit the ATE Impacts contact page.

ATE Central Releases Latest Impacts Book

Thursday, July 28th, 2022 - 11:12am

We are excited to announce the release of the ATE Impacts 2022-2023 book. Copies can be ordered online through the ATE Impacts website, and digital copies of the book can be accessed there as well. The digital copies are viewable across all devices.

The ATE Impacts 2022-2023 book showcases the work of the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education Community. This edition includes a foreword from United States President Joseph Biden and features the work of 33 projects and 28 centers across the seven ATE areas, as well as applied research.

As part of the Impacts book, ATE collaborated with Vox Television to release several videos highlighting the experiences of the ATE community. These videos feature students, administrators, educators, and industry partners sharing how ATE initiatives impacted their lives and careers. The videos can be accessed on ATE's Impacts videos page.

By highlighting the ATE community's successful and innovative work, the book and videos encourage broader participation in the ATE program by academic institutions, educators, and industry partners. Dissemination of the ATE Impacts book advances understanding of the importance of technician education and its role in supporting the high-tech industries that drive the United States' economy.

Metavus 1.0 Released

Thursday, July 28th, 2022 - 10:41am

Metavus 1.0 has been released and is available for download on the Metavus website.

Metavus has a plugin-based architecture, with the core functionality providing basic infrastructure. At the same time, plugins build on the core to deliver extended and expanded capabilities.

Highlights of Metavus include:

Ready to use right after downloading
Quick installation, usually less than five minutes
Fully customizable metadata fields and schemas—Metavus supports 17 distinct types of metadata fields
Powerful built-in search engine which supports keyword, per-field, phrase, and term exclusion searches
Over 25 plugins included, with additional capabilities such as URL checker and OAI-PMH server

More information on Metavus can be found on the Metavus Features page, along with a Metavus demo site and a documentation page on specific Metavus concepts.

We look forward to your feedback on Metavus 1.0.

CWIS version 4.1.1 released

Monday, May 21st, 2018 - 1:31pm

CWIS version 4.1.1 has been released and is now available for download on the Scout site.

This is a maintenance release, focusing primarily on bug fixes, robustness, and increased PHP and MySQL/MariaDB compatibility. More specific detail about additions and fixes can be found on the Change Log page.

PLEASE NOTE: This will likely be the last version of CWIS compatible with PHP 5.x. Active support (from the PHP team) for PHP 5.6 ended in January 2017, and all support (including security fixes) has ended for PHP 5.5 and earlier. PHP 7 provides many substantive benefits - we recommend upgrading ASAP to the latest version of PHP.

This new version of CWIS is also available in an even more turnkey package, as a Vagrant "box", that you can run on your local desktop computer. Instructions for loading the new release via Vagrant (after you have Vagrant running on your computer) are available on the download page.

We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.

CWIS 4.1.0 Released

Friday, February 9th, 2018 - 10:08am

CWIS version 4.1.0 has been released and is now available for download on the Scout Site.

A few highlights of this new release:

- CWIS should now be fully WCAG 2.0 AA compliant for accessibility when using the default interface.

- Emails generated via rules can now be held for approval before being sent, and there is a browsable log of outgoing emails.

- All help pages are now managed by the Pages plugin and are editable via the plugin's WYSIWYG interface.

- And there's definitely more - as usual, much more detail about new additions and fixes can be found via the CWIS Revision History option on the Administration menu.

The minimum PHP version for CWIS 4.1.0 is 5.4, which came out in 2012. If you're running PHP 5.3 or earlier, this might be an excellent time to upgrade to 5.6 or even 7.2, as support from the PHP team (including security fixes) for PHP 5.5 and earlier has ended. At Scout, we have moved to PHP 7 on our production sites because of the significant performance increase it brings.

As always, after installing the new version we ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of the software. It really helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where to go next with development.

We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.

CWIS version 4.0.1 Released

Monday, September 18th, 2017 - 12:22pm

CWIS version 4.0.1 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout Site.

This is a maintenance release, with bug fixes and increased compatibility with a wider range of LAMP environments, but there have been a few improvements and additions:

    CORE IMPROVEMENTS
    - Extended SearchEngine to support 'user is not' searches
    - Added help text to all settings on System Configuration and Advanced System Configuration pages
    - Any errors reported by enabled plugins are now displayed on the Administration page (as well as the Plugins page)
    - Added "uadd" command to cwis command line utility.

    CORE IMPROVEMENTS (Internal)
    - Revised string handling code so that the mbstring extension is no longer required (though it will be used if available)
    - ResourceFactory::ImportResourcesFromXml() added to simplify installation
    - Session cookies now have the Secure and HttpOnly flags set when appropriate, to help minimize the possibility of XSS attacks

NEW PLUGINS
- SavedSearchMailings: replaces the saved search mailing feature previously in the core software, and adds support for saved search emails for search results from non-default schemas (e.g. blog posts, events, pages, etc)

    PLUGIN IMPROVEMENTS
    - DrupalSync: Better error reporting when login sync fails
    - MLPHPList: Add local cache of user information to speed up generating Mailing List Metrics page
    - BotDetector: Do not assume that any IP listed by httpBL as "suspicious" is a bot (as this includes many IPs that are just part of public wifi networks)

The minimum PHP version for CWIS 4.0.1 is 5.4. At Scout we have moved to PHP 7.0 on our production sites because of the significant performance increase it brings. The minimum MySQL/MariaDB version is 5.0.

We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.

CWIS 4.0.0 Released

Monday, June 5th, 2017 - 10:29am

CWIS version 4.0.0 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout Site.

More than anything, CWIS 4.0 represents a quantum jump for the software in three areas: maintainability, customizability, and SEO-friendliness. We’ve invested a great deal of time and energy in the almost two years since 3.2 was released, on smoothing out many of the rough edges in the underlying user interface code, adding new conveniences to make CWIS-based sites easier to maintain, and optimizing the metadata and areas of performance most important to search engines.

That said, there have also been some other improvements and significant new functionality added to CWIS since 3.2:

You can now search for when a field was last modified, using the "@“ operator, and search now supports prefix and suffix operators (“^" and “$") for text fields. (See the Advanced Search Tips box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page for examples.)
Search now works across all content types, including entries created and maintained by the Blog, Calendar Events, and Pages plugins, and the search interface has been refactored to be easier to maintain and customize.
User fields can now be configured to be automatically updated when records are changed.
There's a new Piwik plugin, that automatically inserts the header code required for use with the open source Piwik web analytics package.
The Folders plugin now supports folders containing all content types (e.g. resources, events, blog posts) and transferring folders between users.
Metrics Reporter now tracks and reports on stats for the Blog plugin.
Password complexity requirements are now configurable.
The Rules plugin has been completely refactored to use an IF/THEN model, that supports complex search parameters in the IF section and complex email recipient selection parameters in the THEN section.
The Resource Exporter plugin now supports exporting all content types, allowing the export of (for example) events or blog posts.
The Batch Edit plugin now supports batch editing records for all content types.

(One caveat about the new Rules plugin: it will not work with rules set up under the old plugin, so if you’ve been using Rules, you’ll need to make note of the details of any rules you have set up before upgrading, and then manually add them again using the new plugin.)

And there were a few new additions intended specifically to make development with CWIS easier:

All CSS in the default interface has been replaced with SCSS (AKA Sass), which should be easier to maintain and customize.
The Developer plugin now supports a developer.ini file, that can be used to force plugin configuration settings to specific values and force plugins to be enabled/disabled. (See install/EXAMPLE-developer.ini for more information.) It can come in very handy when copying a database from a production site to a development or test installation.
There is a new "cwis" command line utility, that can be used to perform some common operations directly from the command line. (The utility can also be found in the install directory – you'll need to copy or link to it to somewhere in your PATH to use it, and possibly also check that the first line points to the correct directory for PHP, if you have the PHP executable installed somewhere other than /usr/bin/php.)

As usual, more information about additions and fixes can be found via the CWIS Revision History option on the Administration menu. (If you’re maintaining a custom user interface for your CWIS site or are doing development of any sort with CWIS, it’s definitely worth a look – there are some additional very significant infrastructure enhancements, that are not mentioned above.)

The minimum PHP version for CWIS 4.0.0 is 5.4, which came out in 2012. If you’re running PHP 5.3 or earlier, this might be an excellent time to upgrade to 5.6 or even 7.0, as support from the PHP team (including security fixes) for PHP 5.5 and earlier has ended. At Scout we have moved to PHP 7.0 on our production sites because of the significant performance increase it brings.

As always, after installing the new version we ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of the software. It really helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where to go next with development.

We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.