Watershed Hydrology Online Teaching Materials

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.

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.

This resource provides documents linking to the online resources, organized by topic. The actual online resources are hosted elsewhere.

当肯特州立大学于三月中期转向线上教学时，我正在上水文水资源学课程的中段。就课程背景而言，该课程通常有约20至25名来自地质学、环境研究和保护生物学专业的本科生，以及约5至8名来自地质学和地理学的研究生。我采用布鲁克斯等人的《水文与流域管理》教材的前部分，学生可以通过肯特州立图书馆的电子书获取该教材，但我并不依赖于假设学生正在阅读它。在转为线上教学后，我决定采用异步教学方法，以便学生能够在最适合自己的时间学习材料，并将课堂时间用于“在线办公时间”，学生可以在此期间自愿寻求对概念和问题集的帮助。我结合了自己制作的视频和他人制作的视频、我撰写的博客文章以及现有的网页来支持他们的学习。我为每个单元（约一周的材料）制定了学习目标，并创建了一份可以选择进行两次的多选题测验，以检验学生对材料的理解。每周学生还需要完成与单元概念相关的作业，但我将这些截止日期设定得较为灵活，考虑到在这个动荡学期中，学生可能会因各种事务而感到压力重重。学期初，我们讨论了流域和水文能平衡的拓扑学定义，随后在剩余的课程中逐步深入水循环，从降水和蒸散开始。到三月中期，我们正处于讨论土壤水分和即将进入入渗阶段。由于线上教学的转换带来的干扰，我在课程恢复后实际上是从头开始讲解这个单元。在随后材料的基础上，我开展了关于河流径流生成、河流径流和洪水的完全线上单元。本资源提供了链接到在线资源的文档，按照主题进行组织。实际的在线资源托管在其他地方。