Training Opportunities

Training Opportunities
Important Notice: Project Ocean will not be offered for Summer 2024 while we find a new source of funding for the course and plan for future offerings. We anticipate that the next time this course will be offered is in Summer 2025. Please feel free to read over these pages to better understand what Project Ocean is about. Please note, however, that specific details of how the course is conducted are subject to change (for example, we can already share that Project Ocean will NOT be a formal course at Pennsylvania Western University and therefore will not have graduate credits associated with this course).

Also, you are welcome to check out our other two summer courses (Project Atmosphere and/or Project Ice), which will be running in Summer 2024 (more information on the 2024 offerings will be available later this fall).

Project Ocean has two teacher enhancement components: (a) summer course training (with two parts), and (b) peer-led training sessions.

In component (a), the course phase is held each summer both online and at St. Mary's College of Maryland (SMCM) in St. Mary's City, MD for about 24 participants. This one-week in-person component consists of intensive training sessions including lectures, tutorials, seminars, hands-on laboratory exercises, research cruises, and field trips. Trainers include SMCM faculty members, Navy scientists, and professional science educators. Participants will have an active role in the course and will be placed in breakout groups at times to collaborate with other colleagues on how materials can be integrated into their classrooms. Completion of various online learning modules will be required for completion prior to arriving in St. Mary's City. Upon completion of the on-site portion, teacher-participants will have follow-up activities in the course management system.

In component (b), the teachers trained in the St. Mary's City summer course conduct single-topic sessions on an on-going basis, for their peers within their home states, using single-topic teaching materials developed by AMS specifically for this purpose. These peer-led training sessions are offered by Project Ocean Peer Trainers on a variety of topics treating the physical foundations of oceanography.