B. OOI Education Community of Practice

OOI educational activities, see the McDonnell and Lichtenwalner sidebar.

These new resources add to the collection of materials available for educators and address a diverse range of oceanographic topics and applications. Topics added include upwelling, hypoxia/anoxia, thermohaline circulation, warm core rings, regional seasonal cycles of primary productivity, diel migration, air-sea CO2 fluxes, airsea interaction, seasonal mixing, turbulent mixing, waves, storms, and tidal induced changes in seafloor geothermal activity. These additional resources also expand applications across the curriculum. For instance, the Data Lab Manual may be most useful for introductory oceanography courses that focus on understanding oceanographic concepts and developing basic data skills (the lower levels of Bloom’s cognitive development), while the Data Nuggets could be adapted for use in upper-level undergraduate classes that address more complex, integrated applications, which incorporate the highest level of cognitive development that involves the processes of evaluation and creation (Fig. 6.1). While the community of undergraduate educators engaging with the OOI have made excellent progress in developing resources for teaching introductory oceanography concepts and data skills, significant curricular gaps remain in the areas of (1) real-time data access, (2) resources for integrative upper-level oceanography courses, and (3) accessible data science applications. Instructors at all educational levels have interest in bringing in real-time data, as the most up-to-date look into ocean conditions. Though this is not readily accessible in the current OOI system, the new data portal under development improves access and visualizations of a variety of datasets that will allow for better integration. This new data portal will provide the opportunity to augment curated datasets and develop educational user guides that direct students to the real-time data. Upperlevel oceanography courses require the synthesis of multiple datasets to answer oceanographic questions or explore complex phenomena and, therefore, need more advanced tools and supporting educational materials beyond existing curated datasets and guided activities. For example, Python tutorials that demonstrate how to integrate multiple types of datasets using Jupyter Notebooks and cloud computing (e.g., Google Colabs) could facilitate these explorations. Activities that involve data management and statistical analysis could also be applied more broadly in curricula to support data science curriculum.

B. OOI Education Community of Practice

Keeping existing resources relevant requires sustained effort in growing and supporting a Community of Practice (CoP) of educators where newcomers are supported to join and become more integrated into the community through collaboration and learning with experts and with each other (Lave and Wenger, 1991). For example, the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting featured a suite of OOI educational events, including a Data Lab workshop, a “Teaching with Data…” session wherein half of the presentations focused on using OOI data, and the OOIFB town hall that included a presentation of educational applications. Events such as these generate increased interest and help to broaden the OOI educational community. For more details on current activities within the CoP, see the McDonnell and Lichtenwalner sidebar.

C. Recommendations and Future Directions

Since coming online, the real-time data and high-speed communication capabilities of the OOI have provided an incredible opportunity to open new avenues for diverse students and public audiences to interact with and understand the ocean. Though integrating data into classrooms has its inherent challenges and the OOI data add their own layer of complexities, there have been successful initiatives to break down these barriers of entry (Greengrove et al., 2020).

The pursuit toward more fully integrating OOI data and resources into education is critical to the NSF’s overall mission of developing a diverse, globally competitive 21st century STEM workforce, as well as maintaining the vision and promise of OOI’s innovation through the creation of a future user base positioned to