Best Management Practices for Teaching Hydrologic Coding in Physical, Hybrid, and Virtual Classrooms

Abstract

As the field of hydrologic sciences continues to advance, there is an increasing need to develop a workforce with tools to curate, manage, and analyze large datasets. As such, undergraduate and graduate curricula are beginning to regularly incorporate scientific programing in the classroom. However, there are several key challenges to successfully incorporating scientific programming into a hydrology course or curriculum, such as meeting disciplinary outcomes alongside teaching students to code, equity issues with access to computing power, and effective classroom management. While these challenges were exacerbated by the global pandemic, shifting to online and hybrid learning formats provided an opportunity to explore and re-evaluate the way we facilitated our hydrology courses and integrated coding exercises and learning. In this article, we reflect on these experiences in three very different hydrology courses (e.g., courses housed in geoscience/engineering, environmental science, and biology programs) with an eye toward identifying successes and opportunities for improvement. We explore this by presenting ten best management practices (BMPs), representing a series of recommendations we have for teaching a virtual, hybrid, or in-person hydrology course that incorporates coding. While all recommendations provided can be applied to many programming languages, the focus of the paper (given the expertise of the authors) is on R. Our BMPs focus on technological facilitation, managing the virtual classroom, and instructional resources, with lessons learned that are applicable to in-person instruction. We also summarize the ways that the authors of this article integrate coding into our coursework to serve as a framework for prepping new courses or those revising existing hydrologic coursework. Above all, we hope these series of recommendations will evolve as hydrology courses continue to emphasize computational skills alongside disciplinary learning.

A snapshot sample on how COVID-19 impacted and holds up a mirror to European water education

“…The low response rate to our survey may be because the population of hydrology teachers was too small or because our e-mail with the survey link was flagged as spam or not forwarded within the respective departments. COVID-19 aroused the curiosity of many scientists and educators (including the authors) in studying its effects on education in various scientific fields (Aristovnik et al, 2020;Eklund et al, 2022;Fischer, 2020;Bormann et al, 2021;Fox et al, 2021;Gonzalez et al, 2020;Haley et al, 2021;Keržič et al, 2021;Marzoli et al, 2021;Romeo et al, 2021;Salling Olesen et al, 2021;Wanigasooriya et al, 2021;Stracke et al, 2022). The many surveys conducted in relation to COVID-19 might have caused a certain survey fatigue, as de Koning et al (2021) described, which may also have been the case with our study.…”

“…Hut et al (2020) and Kinar (2021), or learning how to program, e.g. Kelleher et al (2022), taught at distance, could be an add-on to classical classroom teaching. Such activities promote learning by not only considering the lower cognitive domains of Bloom's taxonomy (a.k.a.…”

“…In addition to "traditional" classroom or novel virtual learning environments, hydrology students need laboratory and field experiences to stimulate hypothesis testing and develop hydrological theories (Blume et al, 2017;Kleinhans et al, 2010) and prepare students to cope with all challenges in their professional life (John and Khan, 2018). In addition, the hydrology curriculum needs to also cover, next to wet hands-on experiences, programming skills (Kelleher et al, 2022;Merwade and Ruddell, 2012) and tinker with electronics to sense the environment (Hut et al, 2020;Kinar, 2021). Adding electronics to the curricula not only empowers, but also facilitates a student's hydrological learning and process understanding (Kinar, 2021) and can act as a stepping stone for collecting scientific spatiotemporal hydrometeorological data (Hut et al, 2010;Hund et al, 2016;Assendelft and van Meerveld, 2019;Wickert et al, 2019;Karachalios et al, 2021).…”

Faculty perspectives on a collaborative, multi-institutional online hydrology graduate student training program

“…Several data-and modelingdriven education efforts have also been undertaken (e.g., Sanchez et al, 2016;Maggioni et al, 2020). The rapid transition to online and remote education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed another flurry of innovation in hydrology education and formalized sharing of existing online hydrology education resources and efforts (e.g., Gallagher et al, 2022;Gannon and McGuire, 2022;Kelleher et al, 2022;Schwarzenbach et al, 2022;Thompson et al, 2022;Weaver et al, 2022).…”