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.