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Webinar Series "Blooms" Successfully - 08.08.2011

Participants from twenty-one U.S. states and three countries (including Canada, Iceland and Germany) tuned in for COSEE-OS's most recent webinar series. The five-part series featured scientists from the University of Maine, Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington involved with the North Atlantic Bloom Experiment. Each presentation discussed a different aspect of the North Atlantic Bloom, including the physics that initiate the bloom, the complexity of studying the ocean on differing scales of space and time, the biology and ecology of phytoplankton and carbon, and the relationship of the bloom to global climate change.

 Map
Presenters worked with COSEE-OS staff to prepare related concept maps that they then populated with "assets" from their research and from the Ocean Climate Interactive database. The presentations were each followed by an explanation of a dataset prepared by the scientists and by Ivona Cetinic, a postdoc at the University of Maine. The five datasets produced for the webinar series follow the major themes of the presentation, and are designed to be used in inquiry-based lessons in the classroom.

Each of the presentations are archived on the COSEE-OS website, and videos, concept maps and datasets can be accessed here.

In contrast to "seminar style" webinars (where presenters have topics that may be unrelated to the previous webinar), this webinar series was designed to build on the knowledge gained each week. Webinar presenters frequently mentioned past webinar content, and used similar assets to reinforce the main ideas presented. Consequently, COSEE-OS found that this "mini-series" style webinar lead to a higher rate of returning attendees - with 46% of attendees returning for more than one webinar session in the series (compared to 24% of previous "seminar style" webinar series), and 10% attending all sessions in the series (compared to 2%).

To learn more about COSEE-OS webinars, please visit our webinars page.

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