Ocean School - Innovative, action-inquiry platform

INNOVATIVE. IMMERSIVE. INTERACTIVE. IN-DEPTH

Transforming the way we engage and learn about the ocean through immersive media

56% of students say that they would take a greater interest in STEM classes if they knew how STEM skills relate to the real world. Immersive technologies can provide learners with first-hand, authentic experiences with the tools and practices that scientists use every day. To engage the opportunities raised by immersive technologies in classrooms, teachers need support. 37% of teachers would like to teach with technology, but do not know how.

Our solution is a free innovative web platform that guides the learner through immersive media and integrates seamlessly with Google Classroom. The platform and its tools enable educators to push the boundaries of inquiry based learning—to harness students’ experiences and creativity, empowering them to take increasingly higher responsibility for planning and assessing their own learning.  While our framework adapts to any subject matter, the first exploration of our action-driven inquiry model is Ocean School (OS).

The OS learning experience begins by presenting the learner with a critical challenge that guides their learning and ends with a “take action” on issues like habitat protection, sustainable fishing and traditional ways of knowing. Learners navigate the platform and its media rich learning objects with agency and purpose. OS’s Google integration provides the tools required to gather evidence and assess learning without disrupting the learner’s action-inquiry experience.

In AR/VR, Learners pilot the submersible ROPOS, exploring habitats at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River, dissect cod or learn about its history through the eyes of an Indigenous artist. With 360 video, learners are transported to places they could never go – to a tropical island, 500 kilometres off the coast of Costa Rica – and gain a deeper understanding of our influence on the ocean and the ocean’s influence on us.

Through our rich audio-visual content, OS learners accompany a team of world-renowned scientists and community members on exciting expeditions. OS content exposes learners to a diverse array of marine and STEM careers. As “provocateurs,” our experts and youth hosts introduce students to ideas / subjects that interest them, offering opportunities for learners to engage in their own inquiries.

Ocean School will change the world by providing educators with a wealth of immersive content/activities featuring different locations, scientific concepts, and key environmental/social issues. Every Module is guided by overarching lines of inquiry and media rich learning objects to inspire discussion and motivate action (e.g., VR, AR, micro-docs, 360 videos, linear videos).  OS helps educators/learners visualize and access the rich data generated by ocean observing systems, and engage a wide public audience in ocean exploration and discovery.

Ocean School will change the world by providing learners — the next generation of ocean citizens, innovators, and decision makers — with the knowledge and tools to investigate and design innovative solutions for the accelerating challenges that face the world’s oceans.

The North Atlantic unit will launch in October 2018 as we continue to develop our model and resources with educators and students to ensure they are meaningful, relevant and accessible.

Ocean School’s web platform uses creative storytelling techniques and disruptive technologies anchored in inquiry-based learning at a depth which has not been offered before. OS provides educators with engaging content / activities that promote meaningful integration of technology and assessment. Using 360 video, VR and AR, OS delivers experiences that create an emotional and lasting connection with the environment, providing motivation for learners to address critical challenges by taking action. All OS assets are free and designed to be repurposed, allowing users to re-define the learning 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 unit (English and French). While continuing to pursue partnerships, we will begin filming with the Heiltsuk - a coastal indigenous community in British-Columbia. In early 2019, 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 technologists in private sector, 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 educators, museums and libraries throughout the world. Starting this fall in Costa Rica, we are working educators in new regions to ensure that the content and education model is relevant, accessible and meaningful to learners everywhere. As the platform and its content and interactives grow, we plan on building a rich set of educator resources and Ocean School Champions (trained educators) to support the use of Ocean School in classrooms, museums and library settings.

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 potential other languages (e.g. Norwegian).

OS’s deployment will launch online October 2018 on NFB’s NEW digital offer—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 EdTech 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 in the advancement of desired technologies. 

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