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OCEAN 215

Methods of oceanographic data analysis

Autumn 2020 | University of Washington School of Oceanography

B-SOSE model output

Welcome to the course website for OCEAN 215, as taught in Autumn 2020 by two graduate students, Ethan Campbell and Katy Christensen. The goal of this course is to equip undergraduate students to analyze oceanographic data with confidence using the Python programming language.

OCEAN 215 has been offered since 2015 by Prof. Stephen Riser. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we completely redesigned the course using a flipped, virtual instructional approach. All materials here are original.

On this website, you can find:

  • the course syllabus,
  • information about the co-instructors,
  • and a weekly calendar with links to videos, slides, activities, assignments, and other resources.

Our 41 recorded lesson videos can also be accessed directly on our YouTube channel.

Reuse of materials

The course materials linked on this website, with the exception of the lesson videos on YouTube, are licensed under CC-BY-4.0. This Creative Commons license allows for free reuse and adaptation as long as attribution is included to the authors, Ethan Campbell and Katy Christensen, and to this website. The lesson videos are licensed under YouTube’s Standard license. If you find our materials useful in your teaching, we would love to hear about it, though this is not required. Solution notebooks to assignments can be provided upon request.

Evaluation study

We conducted a retrospective study assessing the efficacy of the course elements and teaching strategies that we used in Autumn 2020, which concluded that “the instructional design facilitated learning and supported [students’] self-guided scientific inquiry.” Our paper published in Journal of Geoscience Education offers a detailed analysis and commentary on these teaching materials. It can be referenced using the following citation:

Campbell, E.C.*, Christensen, K.M.*, Nuwer, M., Ahuja, A., Boram, O., Liu, J., Miller, R., Osuna, I., Riser, S.C. (2024). Cracking the code: An evidence-based approach to teaching Python in an undergraduate earth science setting. Journal of Geoscience Education, in press. doi:10.1080/10899995.2024.2384338. (* Co-first authors, reflecting equal contributions to this work)