Following its successful implementation of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Online Weather Studies Course, the College at Old Westbury was eager to participate in the AMS's Online Ocean Studies Diversity Project. Old Westbury is located on Long Island, which is in the southeastern portion of New York State. This geographic area encompasses over 1300 square miles and has a population of over 7.5 million. Its four counties (Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk) are highly diverse racially, socially, and economically. The island's southern coastline extends for nearly 150 miles along the Atlantic Ocean, and its northern coastline forms a boundary for the Long Island Sound. Given the proximity of oceanic and estuarine environments, Online Ocean Studies should provide the opportunity to introduce general scientific concepts with immediate and obvious relevance for students.

Having participated in the June 2007 Online Ocean Studies Implementation Workshop, held at the University of Washington in Seattle, our first offering of this course will be in the spring 2008 semester. Taken together, the lecture and lab will fulfill Old Westbury's General Education requirement for a laboratory science course. By offering a lab course online, we are able to provide for those students whose work and/or family obligations make it difficult for them to accommodate the time commitment of a traditional in-class weekly lab session. The AMS online model has worked well for us with Weather Studies; academic year sections have consistently filled and we have added a summer session. Since the ocean is an integral part of life on Long Island, we are anxious to include a hands-on experience in our Ocean Studies offering, and further the academic link between oceanographic theory and the students own familiar summer playground (the beach). We therefore plan to include several laboratory exercises that will require the student to apply their knowledge to the local environment. By engaging students, both personally and intellectually, in ocean science as part of an earth system, we hope to further not only their future involvement in local environmental issues but also their commitment to a sustainable and global world view.

The State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury was chartered in 1965 and is the only public comprehensive liberal arts college on Long Island. Old Westbury was originally envisioned as an experimental institution, innovative in curricula, procedures and academic policies. Later, the institution added to its mission the goal of educating a diverse, multicultural student population through a curriculum that addressed fundamental issues in American society. The initial curriculum was entirely interdisciplinary in structure and remains largely so today. Current enrollment is approximately 3,340 students, largely from local Long Island communities and the metropolitan New York area. Over 50% of its students are racial or ethnic minorities, approximately 60% are female, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Old Westbury is the model of ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity within the SUNY system.