Florida Community College of Jacksonville is a large urban college located in Northeast Florida. The American Meteorological Society's Online Ocean Studies course will be taught during the fall semester of 2008. Students will begin the class with a three day field experience on Sapelo Island, a barrier island located on the Georgia coast. During this three day time period, students will collect data and make observations on tides, marine sediments, waves, currents, shorelines, and ocean-atmosphere connections. The field experience will be followed by weekly lab sessions where students use the data and observations collected in the field to develop hypotheses and design experiments using the scientific method. The lab sessions will complement the weekly online ocean studies investigations. By doing this, the global principles presented in the course will apply to their local first hand experiences as the students develop their problem solving skills.