Tom Garrison’s education column in the last issue of our magazine gave a vivid description of the challenges today’s oceanography educators face in a first-year lecture theatre. In my student days, an introductory course in oceanography was the first step on the way towards a professional career in oceanography, and the class was correspondingly small. Today, a teacher of first-year introductory oceanography faces a class of several hundred students, and teaching oceanography turns into a course of basic science concepts, using examples from the ocean. This generates new challenges for the teacher, who has to correct misconceptions in many fields, from simple geography to the principles of mechanics, from statistics to evolution.

Tomczak, M. 2005. Education—The oceanography classroom: Catering to the multitudes. Oceanography 18(2):256–259, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2005.63.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.