Online Ocean Studies: National Dissemination with Collegial Professional Development Activity for Undergraduate Faculty in Minority-Serving Institutions

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The American Meteorological Society (AMS), in cooperation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and an Advisory Board of Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) faculty members, is providing professional development for faculty members from 75 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) who are implementing Online Ocean Studies. Online Ocean Studies is a turnkey distance-learning course developed by the AMS that is partially delivered by the Internet. The course and the project embody a model of continuous faculty development through a unique local-national teaching partnership. The goal of the project is to increase minority student participation in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM) while simultaneously promoting the widespread teaching of the introductory college-level oceanography course. The project addresses the acute need to attract minority college students to STEM studies, particularly in the ocean sciences. Participating faculty (from 25 MSIs per year for 3 years) attend a 5-day workshop at NOAA and university oceanographic facilities plus a 3-day workshop treating science content and pedagogical issues held at the AMS Annual Meeting each January.The intellectual merit of the course is based on the implementation of an Earth system approach to the teaching of oceanography, which emphasizes the use of real world and near real time oceanographic data delivered via the Internet. The broader impacts of the proposed project are based on increasing student access to high-quality learning experiences with the goal of spurring student interest in STEM. The goal is to make possible the offering of an introductory college-level oceanography course at hundreds of undergraduate institutions not currently offering an oceanography course-especially those institutions with substantial numbers of students from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM. Online Ocean Studies models a delivery system and teaching partnership possessing significant potential for other course applications, especially in those disciplines that rely on the Internet to deliver observational data streams.