DES Online Education and Public Outreach

A recent case study (https://scirate.com/arxiv/1804.00591) by Wolf et al., looks into the the strategy and programming of the online education and public outreach efforts of The Dark Energy Survey (DES), which utilizes large scale collaboration from the public. The DES online products reach about 2,350 science-interested persons per social media post. The study finds that when hobbies of the participating scientists are utilized, the scientist participation and collaboration support are most successful. The article has a number of recommendations for education and outreach programs hoping to utilize large scale collaborative support from the public.