OOI Science Plan: Exciting Opportunities using OOI Data
ensure high returns on this research investment. Specifically, supporting educators and their students at all levels in building data skills is important to fulfill NSF’s Broader Impacts targets including: full participation of women, persons with disabilities and underrepresented minorities in STEM; development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce; increased economic competitiveness of the United States; and increased public STEM literacy and public engagement with STEM (National Science Foundation, 2018).
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will take a team of dedicated professionals led by the OOI Education Coordination Office to regularly provide and maintain resources, as well as support the community in the development and sharing of new resources. 3. Establish an OOI community of peer educator leaders. There is a strong correlation between educator preparedness and student participation in and support of science (NRC, 2010b). Investing in professional development programs is critical for expanding the future scientific workforce and a science-supportive society. Future educators, at all levels, including undergraduate, graduate, K-12, and informal, must be provided with the tools to construct meaningful and coherent curriculum from the vast array of online learning resources that will be available from the OOI. This must be done thoughtfully and systematically, as each of these education communities have different wants and needs. It is imperative that OOI continue to build and expand this community to support the goals and vision established in 2005 (ORION Executive Steering Committee, 2005).
To realize this continuing vision, we recommend the following strategic objectives to support the OOI Education Community of Practice: 1. Support an OOI Education and Coordination Office. The primary purpose of the OOI Office Education and Coordination Office would be to ensure that the OOI education efforts are sufficiently coordinated, coherent, and sustained so the OOI education goals can be achieved. Educators in the Data Labs CoP have very intense teaching schedules and limited institutional support for professional development and need a coordinating office and dedicated team of technical professionals to help them achieve their goals.
Much remains to be done to fully realize the potential of utilizing OOI data in educational settings. We reiterate the invitation to “join the community to develop, implement, and assess data-based OOI educational resources” and “dive in, build partnerships, and help plumb the depths of the OOI data set to find new and relevant ways to engage students with the data that can be shared as new activities to benefit educators and students at all institutions” (Greengrove et al., 2020).
2. Support OOI data accessibility and content translation. A team of dedicated professionals, translation including educators as well as science visualization, technical, and OOI data experts are needed in order to create content and explore new methods for bringing observatory data to students and educators. We suggest facilitating the creation of web- and cloud-based learning resources, including online training modules, interactive visualizations, Python notebooks, etc., in order to fill the curricular gaps such as those identified above. Though educational resources can be generated through grassroots efforts from the educational community, it
Note: The recommendations presented above represent the opinion of the Section 6 authors.
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