Summary, Guiding Question #1

How can we build greater awareness of scientific ocean drilling, and scientific ocean drilling-related career opportunities?

×

Show caption

Hide

Figure 2. Virtual tours can convey a sense of place, show researchers working, and give the audience information points to further investigate the science. Image taken from Virtual Ice Tours (https://virtualice.byrd.osu.edu/)

Provenance: Adriane Lam, SUNY at Binghamton
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Values and Priorities

• Increase awareness of the program and its many facets by educators (of all levels), their students, the public-at-large[addressed more directly by the Engaging the Public workshop June 22-24; link here to that section of the report], and policymakers and their staff[addressed more directly by the Engaging Policymakers workshop July 19-21; link here to that section of the report]. Many people aren't aware of scientific ocean drilling, and so as a consequence are not aware of the many and varied career options. We recognize the need to reach under 12's (start them early!) and undergrads, but maintain interest levels in between – capture the imagination at regular intervals.
• Demonstrate relevance. Connect IODP opportunities more clearly to real job opportunities and the development of transferable skills, both academic and non-academic, that can be used in other sectors such as green energy. Also connect to local communities and show how scientific ocean drilling would benefit them and how their knowledge can, in turn, benefit the program. Emphasize sense of place and how SciOD developed skills can help protect and conserve that.
• Showcase diversity in all areas of scientific ocean drilling. This includes gender, career level, age, institution-type, ethnicity, and career area. For example, communicating that scientific ocean drilling depends on not only scientists from many different fields, but also engineers, technicians, information technology experts, programmers and modelers, and ships' crew collectively show the real people doing those jobs as inspiration. 

Recommended Tools and/or Strategies

• Continue to develop, and expand, in-person and online short courses and seminars for undergraduate and K-12 communities, and advertise them more widely. Make different seminar ranges for different age groups. Include IODP content in undergraduate teaching. Continue to arrange activities, in particular in-person events as contact with scientists is very impactful. However, other audiences are best reached through podcasts, videos, lectures, exhibitions. It is important that reaching younger audiences, pre-undergraduate stage, is included. Strengthen program impact by repeating the message through a number of different engagement and communication methods (e.g., videos and then classroom activities).
• Make stronger use of interactive tools and techniques. Such tools and techniques will help audiences visualize geographical and physical locations they will never visit (e.g., polar regions and on research vessels: Figure 2), and couple imagery with learning touchpoints, making scientific research expeditions "real". 
• Use the social media platform that is most used by your target audience.  Recognize the different content requirements for something your audience would seek out (e.g. podcasts) versus something that comes up automatically on a news feed. 
• Develop and maintain partnerships with organizations already working within target communities. This may involve setting up an ambassador program of individuals who are funded to promote SciOD within their community, or already embedded within the community. Workshop participants supported building relationships and networks.

Challenges

• Awareness of the program. Increased promotion of scientific ocean drilling is critical to communities external to the science community, especially to students before they make decisions on courses.
• Need for all outreach to be customized. One size does not fit all, so you have to know your audience. This has implications on how much the program can do, time, reach, and funding needs.
• Current capabilities and budget. The scope suggested in the Science Framework versuscurrent operational capacities.  The program needs to prioritize our audiences and set realistic timescales for project impact.