OCEAN - OIL (Online Clearinghouse for Education And Networking - Oil Interdisciplinary Learning

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The Online Clearinghouse for Education And Networking - Oil Interdisciplinary Learning (OCEAN-OIL) project is establishing an online mechanism and resource for STEM faculty members to create, share, evaluate, improve, adapt and/or utilize a variety of resources, in many formats, to inform their instruction about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a "teachable moment," as well as to enhance student learning about broader considerations related to the benefits, risks, and potential impacts of offshore oil production and its associated energy, environmental, social and political complexities. The OCEAN-OIL website is being seamlessly integrated into the Encyclopedia of Earth (www.eoearth.org), which is a free, peer-reviewed, searchable collection of content about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society, written by expert scholars and educators. The OCEAN-OIL project has three goals: 1) to spur activity to develop and share materials, 2) to facilitate dissemination and adoption of these materials, and 3) to promote deep thinking about the relationship between humans, their needs, and the Earth. As a collaboration between the National Council for Science and the Environment, Boston University, and Louisiana State University, the project is creating OCEAN-OIL as a comprehensive, interdisciplinary website with content that has multiple entry points for varying levels of expertise, particularly STEM faculty and undergraduate students, and whose instructional resources focus on 'big ideas' in Earth science, ocean, and climate literacy that have been generated by broad research communities. Resources being shared include high quality undergraduate pedagogic material related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, addressing content directly related to the spill and the underlying issues that provide the larger context to the spill. A wide community of experts is engaged in developing the website. OCEAN-OIL provides online tools to increase its utility to undergraduate educators, and includes a mechanism for educator and student evaluations to provide feedback to the project on the resource's utility. The project is studying the effectiveness of using OCEAN-OIL materials in courses taught in Fall 2010 at Boston University and Louisiana State University. The evaluation is studying the quality, use, and impact of the website through usage data analytics, feedback from faculty, and data from common student assessments employed by faculty who use OCEAN-OIL materials in their courses.This project in the Division of Undergraduate Education (Education and Human Resources Directorate) is being co-funded by the Geosciences Directorate and the Biology Directorate.