Collaborative Research: Strengthening the OOI Data Labs Community of Practice (CoP) to enhance undergraduate data literacy

Cuny Queens College, Flushing NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Ocean Observing Initiative (OOI) is an observational network of over eight hundred ocean instruments providing near real-time data that is freely available online. A collaborative group of ocean education faculty from Rutgers University and Stockton University in New Jersey, Hillsborough Community College in Florida, and City University of New York Queens College and the Science Education Resources Center at Carleton College in Minnesota will support curriculum development and student engagement using advanced technologies of the OOI. The work will maintain and extend the Community of Practice of professors engaged in teaching with OOI data. These professors will be engaged in the project with the goal of building data literacy in students with effective course materials and expanding the workforce capacity in ocean data science and data analytics. Recruitment of participants will focus on faculty from two-year colleges, regional four-year colleges, and minority serving institutions, whose student populations include greater numbers of students who are first-generation, veterans, non-traditional, and/or from historically marginalized communities. The project will provide targeted professional development opportunities for professors to become more expert users of OOI assets, such as the newly located Pioneer Array, and data streams while increasing undergraduates’ engagement and understanding of core concepts in oceanography. Through these professional development opportunities, the project will empower a community of undergraduate instructors to teach oceanography while developing students’ data skills using OOI data assets. The project will advance the existing OOI Ocean Data Labs program model by providing targeted faculty professional development to promote learning of ocean literacy and data skills and expand educational resources that bring OOI data into undergraduate geoscience curriculum. An assessment of community needs will inform the development of additional relevant content, that can be articulated and taught using OOI assets. The Data Labs online resources provide scaffolded activities involving guided step-by-step instructions on how to orient and interpret data from the OOI that are tied to fundamental principles in oceanography. The activities meet users’ needs by placing information into relevant context, self-checking knowledge throughout the activities and promoting self-directed discovery to support undergraduate students that would benefit from more practice with math or data skills and well as students who are ready for higher order learning objectives. This project will also expand the collection of OOI educational resources, by engaging the community in the development of new activities and new Python-based structured activities that introduce technical skills and further the data literacy of students learning oceanographic concepts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.