About

astroEDU makes the best science activities, particularly those with an astronomical, earth or space science focus, accessible to educators around the world.

astroEDU is an open-access platform for peer-reviewed science education activities.

astroEDU is a platform for educators to discover, review, distribute, improve, and remix educational activities.

Why peer reviewed educational activities? astroEDU assigns two reviewers; a research scientist and an educator to review the activity. This process increases the quality of the scientific content, educational implementation and credibility of the activities.

What does astroEDU expect to achieve? astroEDU tries to solve some past issues with educational activities: Many of the educational activities are difficult to find, difficult to use. The number of existing activities is large, but their quality is often difficult to judge. Through peer-review astroEDU is improving standards of quality, visibility and providing credibility to educational activities.

What incentive is there for the activity creators? The same way that peer-reviewed scholarly articles are the base for performance evaluation of scholars, astroEDU will provide a new metric to assess the quality of the work developed by educators. The activities will also be given higher visibility with much wider distribution through the partner networks and the official seal of the IAU.

Which license does astroEDU use? One of the main goals of the astroEDU is to promote the use of excellent activities worldwide. That is the reason why all the astroEDU activities will be licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

What about other languages? At the moment astroEDU is a prototype to test the infrastructure and procedures. We already accept activity submission in different languages, although the astroEDU on-line platform is only available in English for now. However, language support will follow as soon as astroEDU leaves the prototype phase.

Could you be a reviewer? If you are an educator or research astronomer who would be willing to review submitted activities, please get in touch. www.iau.org/astroedu

Who is behind astroEDU?

astroEDU is supported by International Astronomical Union Office of Astronomy for Education.

Steering Committee

Edward Gomez (LCO), Jaya Ramchandani (The Story Of Foundation/Sirius Interactive, India), Stefano Sandrelli (INAF, Italy)

The international edition is supported by:

  • Editor-in-chief: Livia Giacomini (INAF, Italy)
  • Associate Editor: Giulio Mazzolo (Switzerland)
  • Assistant Editor: Gwen Sanderson (OAE, Germany)
  • Editorial Advisor: Edward Gomez (LCO, UK)

Founders: Edward Gomez (Las Cumbres Observatory, UK) and Pedro Russo (UNAWE/Leiden University, the Netherlands)

Support: astroEDU is currently supported by IAU OAE.

Past members of the astroEDU team

Editor-in-chief 2013 -2016 - Linda Strubbe

Editor-in-chief 2016 - 2022 - Michael Fitzgerald

Associate editor 2013 - 2018 - Thilina Heenatigala

Development was supported by the International Astronomical Union under the framework of the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development, Leiden University, and Las Cumbres Observatory. astroEDU was part of Europlanet 2020 RI and EU Space Awareness projects and it has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 654208, and the Royal Astronomical Society

[Download astroEDU poster]