When Kent State “pivoted to online” in mid-March, I was about half-way through my Watershed Hydrology class. For context, this class typically has about 20-25 undergraduate students, from geology, environmental studies, and conservation biology majors, and about 5-8 graduate students from geology and geography. I use the first part of the Brooks et al “Hydrology and the Management of Watersheds” textbook, which students have access to as an e-book through the Kent State library, but I don’t rely heavily on assuming the students are reading it. My goal for the 2020 edition of my class was to feature a hands-on activity in the classroom approximately weekly. That unfortunately, went out the window when we pivoted online in mid-March.
Side note: I really appreciated that Kent State and other universities distinguished between our suddenly online classes (which we called “remote instruction”) and classes that were intentionally designed to be delivered 100% online. But for simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to call it online on the blog.
What I did
When we went online, I decided to use an asynchronous approach so that students could work through the material at times that worked best for them, and then use class time for “online office hours” where students could optionally come and get help with concepts and problem sets. I used a mix of videos I created and those by others, blog posts I wrote and existing web pages to support their learning. I wrote out learning objectives for each unit (~1 week of material) and created a multiple choice quiz that they could take 2 times to check their understanding of the material. Each week the students also had to a problem set tied to the concepts of the unit, but I made those deadlines soft, recognizing that it would be easy for students to get overwhelmed with everything going on during this turbulent semester.
We start the semester talking about the topographic definition of watersheds and water and energy balances. Then we spend the rest of the semester working our way through the water cycle, starting with precipitation and evapotranspiration. So by mid-March, we were in the midst of discussing soil moisture and just moving into infiltration. Because of the disruption associated with moving online, I essentially just started the unit over when classes resumed. Following that material, I had fully online units on streamflow generation, streamflow, and floods.
Watch for upcoming blog posts to provide the resources and materials I used for each of the units that I taught on line.
Looking back
Am I happy with how the online portion of Watershed Hydrology played out in Spring 2020? More or less. I think given all of the constraints surrounding the rapid transition and circumstances of the online period meant that both I and my students did the best we could. I provided content, support, and grace for students to achieve what they wanted to achieve in my class this spring. To me, that’s the most important outcome.
Would I do the exact same thing if I had to teach Watershed Hydrology online again? No. I hope never to find myself in a position to pivot to online so suddenly again, without childcare, in the middle of a pandemic, so this was clearly not a thoughtful, best-case scenarios for teaching Watershed online. I am generally happy with the content I provided, though I might scaffold it differently in a future offering, as well as add/drop some things. I would certainly write a different syllabus in terms of expectations for a fully online class.
The biggest thing I would change is that I would add a larger synchronous component to the online course, particularly if the entire semester would be online. I did have an optional synchronous component to my 2020 class, that I billed online office hours, but held during the previously scheduled class period. During that time I was available via Blackboard Collaborate Ultra and able to answer questions about problem sets and other course content. Several students regularly attended those online office hours and found them very valuable, but other students never participated and only experienced the course asynchronously after the transition online. I was very sensitive to limitations in high speed internet access, increased family care and work responsibilities, and illness, and I want to acknowledge that those limitations will continue to exist. But I would like to find a way to have broader (if not complete) participation in synchronous sessions in any future online offering. I can envision using the synchronous sessions as an opportunity not just for students to get homework help, but also for students to work collaboratively on virtual “hands-on activities” involving data exploration (e.g., via Shiny apps) or internet-hosted modeling interfaces) or have group discussions based on videos that students had watched ahead of time.
Looking ahead
While I don’t think that an online Watershed Hydrology class can offer the same experience for students and instructors as safely being in the classroom, field, or laboratory, I do think that we can offer a rich and rewarding experience online, with the right preparation and the right community infrastructure and resources. That’s why I’m thrilled to be part of an NSF-funded team working to rapidly develop and deploy such infrastructure resources for distance education in the hydrologic sciences.
In the midst of the chaos of spring 2020, a dream team of hydrologic scientists and educators, lead by Adam Ward of Indiana University, assembled to propose the RAPID and then immediately (even before funding) began to roll out community resources, including CUAHSI-hosted virtual forums and cyberseminars for discussing strategies and challenges for online hydrology education, a new Hydroshare collection of educational resources (where my course materials will go), and a virtual guest lecturer database (sign up here). Look for these activities to continue and expand through the summer and fall as we contemplate what our courses will look like in the next academic year and beyond.
While spring 2020 was incredibly rough on us as faculty and on our students, we can make future online hydrology experiences better for everyone by collaborative developing the needed tools and sharing our knowledge and resources.
Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.