The Maury Project, DataStreme Ocean, and Online Ocean Studies: AMS Initiatives in Ocean Science Education

Abstract

The education program of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) has developed and nationally implemented two unique pre-college teacher enhancement programs on the ocean sciences, the Maury Project and DataStreme Ocean. In addition, the AMS has employed the successful DataStreme model to make available to colleges and universities an undergraduate distance-learning course on the fundamentals of oceanography, Online Ocean Studies. The Maury Project, established in 1994, is a partnership with the U.S. Naval Academy and State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport, with significant support from the U.S. Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Maury Project trains and equips pre-college teachers to be peer trainers on the physical foundations of selected oceanographic topics. They are initially trained in a two-week workshop hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy. Subsequently, participating teachers present training sessions for other teachers with materials prepared by the Project. To date, approximately 300 educators have attended the workshop and tens of thousands of teachers have been peer trained. In 2003, with the goal of reaching a larger audience of pre-college teachers, the AMS in partnership with NOAA and SUNY Brockport initiated DataStreme Ocean. DataStreme Ocean is a semester-long distance-learning course on the basic understandings of oceanography and partially delivered via the Internet. Maury Project alumni work with local university and government laboratory scientists to mentor DataStreme Ocean participants. By fall 2005, over 600 teachers had been enrolled in DataStreme Ocean. Online Ocean Studies is a distance-learning introductory college-level course on the basic understandings of oceanography developed by the AMS in cooperation with NOAA. This semester-length course explores the ocean in the Earth system via investigations keyed to near real-time environmental data derived from ocean and coastal observing systems. Online Ocean Studies is a turnkey package (Web site, customized textbook, investigations manual, and secure faculty Web page) licensed from AMS and adaptable to both traditional lecture/laboratory and totally online local instruction. The AMS piloted Online Ocean Studies during spring 2005 with eleven participating colleges and universities. National implementation took place in fall 2005. Recently, the AMS embarked on a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to facilitate adoption of Online Ocean Studies by minority-serving institutions. The goal is to spur minority student interest in the geosciences.