Ocean School: An Ocean Literacy Accelerator

Building Adaptive Capacity in Coastal Communities by fostering Ocean Literacy

Coastal communities are at the forefront of climate and ocean change, and quickly need to build human capacity in order to adapt to these accelerating challenges. Yet, recent studies have shown that ocean literacy - defined as a comprehensive knowledge and awareness of how the ocean affects us, and how we affect the ocean - is lacking in many communities. Thus the ability of coastal community members to make complex decisions around sustainable and resilient development is often low and this can results in unsustainable practises. In 2017, the United Nations recognized this key challenge and added ocean literacy in their call to action for Sustainable Development Goal 14 (Life under water).

We propose to address this problem through a free innovative web platform called Ocean School, aimed at youth and young adults in coastal communities around the world. Ocean School uses state-of-the-art educational tools to explore the cutting-edge of scientific discovery and social innovation. It leverages a combination of innovative storytelling, augmented and virtual reality experiences and interactive games to foster deep engagement with current ocean challenges and solutions. An Ocean School Prototype has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of ocean scientists, filmmakers and educational innovators over the last 3 years and has been tested and refined with youth from North America and Europe. It is ready to be scaled up and deployed in coastal communities around the world.

Ocean School will change the world by providing the next generation of ocean citizens, innovators, and decision makers with the knowledge and tools to make their own informed decisions regarding our changing ocean environment and the best course of action to take in their personal and collective lives. OS will help build a global online community of young ocean explorers and enthusiasts, and leverage their inherent fascination with the ocean and its creatures to bring about social change in our attitude towards the marine environment. It will help to visualize and make accessible the rich data that are constantly being generated by ocean observing systems, and engage a wide public audience in ocean exploration and discovery. It will foster the growth of citizen science as another global sensor to track and understand rapid ocean change. And it will crowdsource the intellects of young people in diverse cultures from around the world to design innovative solutions that will meet the accelerating challenges of coastal communities in the 21st century.

Ocean School’s web platform uses creative storytelling techniques and disruptive technologies to foster real engagement with the ocean environment, its complexities, challenges and opportunities. OS provides engaging content, thought-pieces, data visualization and activities that transform their understanding of the ocean, empowering them to become agents of changes. Using 360˚ video, VR/AR and collaborative gaming, OS delivers experiences that create an emotional and lasting connection with the coastal environment, providing motivation for learners to address critical challenges by taking action. All OS assets are customizable, allowing users to easily redefine the experience to fit their needs, interests and imaginations.

By choosing to deliver our product in the browser, we are investing in making a variety of immersive technologies (VR, AR, interactive HTML) accessible. The seamless integration of these technologies into the browser increases ease-of-use for both teachers and students. 

Our interactive simulations use VR and AR to create collaborative experiences, such as driving an underwater drone to collect data on marine species. Our real-time interactive data visualizations help learners explore and communicate about data. 

Ocean School is integrated with Google Classroom which provides educators with free, collaborative productivity tools that enable seamless and secure interactions across multiple devices.

Fall 2018, we launch our North-Atlantic Pilot Unit (English/French). While continuing to pursue partnerships, we will begin filming with the Heiltsuk - a coastal indigenous community in British-Columbia. In early 2019, we will launch an Open Ocean module in Latin America (Spanish).

Over the next three to five years we will build strategic partnerships across multiple sectors (academia, EdTech, leading private sector technologists , leading media labs) to help us to validate and improve our model, as well as scale it to a global audience. We will explore innovative approaches to real-time assessment that leverage the responsive affordances of AR/VR.

Our solution will impact a greater number of people as we translate the platform and its content into more languages and continue to build partnerships with educational institutions, museums and libraries throughout the world. Starting this fall in Costa Rica, we are working educators in developing and emerging economies to ensure that the content and education model is relevant, accessible and meaningful to a global community. As the platform and its content and interactives grow, we are building a rich set of educator resources and Ocean School Champions (trained educators) to support the use of Ocean School.

Our Ocean School platform is free online making it accessible in Canada and around the world. Content is targeted to English and French audiences, with select translation to Spanish and eventually other languages (e.g. Norwegian, Mandarin).

OS’s deployment will launch online October 2018 and is promoted through offline/online channels:

• Extensive Media coverage (online, print, radio/tv)

• National student contest

• Social media campaign + influencers

• Face-to-face meetings with Ministries of Education

We are creating a network of teacher Champions to support OS’s roll-out. The Champions are teacher/consultants to help new adopters follow good practices in inquiry-based learning with OS assets.

A free web platform offered in English and French, OS aims to serve 1500 teachers and 45 000 students (11-15 years old) in Canada in the first 9 months. When asked about the benefits of Ocean School, piloting educators have told us it’s a resource that is a “visual, modern and research-driven and makes what is happening in the real world accessible” to learners. Learners “get to navigate on their own and explore the aspects which interest them the most—a more engaging way to deliver content”.  Others noted the connection to local oceanography—"a topic students don’t have experience with".

We aim to give educators a powerful platform from which to build action-inquiry lessons in their classroom and include educators in our development to ensure their needs are incorporated. We expect to see an increased use of IBL and disruptive technologies by educators/students over the next three years—our model inspiring real-world action for building sustainable solutions led by youth.

The NFB’s educational platform is currently accessed by more than 30% of Canadian public schools reaches 160,000 teachers and 3 million youth. As OS’s free online solution expands to Latin America and Norway in 12 months, it is already built to scale. 

Ocean School is developed by a dynamic interdisciplinary team working at the intersection of EdTech, Science and Storytelling.  

The National Film Board of Canada guides the education/ storytelling development of OS. A diverse team of award-winning digital creators and innovative EdTech producers are designing innovative inquiry-based learning models, emphasizing a global lens to interactive tools and active learning materials.

Dalhousie University is Canada's Ocean University, and their ground-breaking marine scientists, led by Dr Boris Worm, develop Ocean School's scientific themes and approach. They possess strong international development expertise and are able to leverage an extensive academic network.

The Ocean School platform solution is built around a not-for-profit revenue model that focuses on accessing private and public funding to continue to expand our digital content and platform. OS is an accessible, free offering to global audiences and while there is no expectation of a spinoff revenue model, we believe that some of our processes are unique and could potentially be spun-off in the future.  

OS’s key founders have sustained funding for the next few years. The NFB, as an agency of the Government of Canada, obtains annual program funding able to partially sustain the development and delivery of content. Dalhousie University, through the Ocean Frontier Institute, has guaranteed funding until 2024. 

OS has received funding from The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Government), the Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, the Canada Science and Technology Museum and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission-UNESCO. 

Funding proposals are currently being evaluated by several national and international foundations including the Honda Foundation, the Lawson Foundation, The Prince Albert Foundation and Tides Canada. 

While Ocean School is a pioneering platform in its edu-tech form and depth designed to support educators teaching with technologies, we believe we would benefit in growing our platform through the transdisciplinary expertise of Solve’s global community. Our pilot would advance in the culture of innovation through global connections to Education (academia) and creative technologists. Strategic collaborations would allow us to explore: 

• Innovative approaches to real-time educational assessment for teachers & educators that leverage the responsive affordances of AR/VR/Mixed Reality technologies;

• Increasing the accessibility of the interactive materials to reach wider audience segments;

• Information visualization methods that promote learning.

Technologies we seek to integrate have not yet matured and therefore we need to work in close alignment with tech companies and Media-Labs to work through potential solutions.

We need to work with tech partners to devise ways in which we can continue to make Ocean School more accessible to coastal communities worldwide. While Ocean School is positioned to sustain its platform through some of its committed annual program funding, we are searching for new funding opportunities to encourage our platform’s growth and reach, allowing investment in future technologies that ensure relevancy within the edu-tech ecosystem.