Towards Broader Adoption of Educational Innovations in Undergraduate Water Resources Engineering: Views from Academia and Industry

Abstract

This article investigates the challenges that face the development, community-scale adoption, and long-term sustainability of educational innovations in the field of hydrology and water resources engineering undergraduate education. Adopting a customer-based discovery process, the current study conducted a set of 78 informal interviews with two main groups: faculty members who teach water resources and hydrology courses, and practicing engineers with specialty in the same field. The interviews revealed that the main motivation for faculty to develop or adopt new educational innovations stems from self-efficacy and desire to achieve effective instructional strategies. Other factors, such as institutional requirements and faculty evaluations and incentives, seem to play a modulating role for generating selfcreated motivation. The results identified time limitations and steep learning-curves as the two adoption hindering factors cited by a majority of the interviewees. Other hindering factors reported were rigidity of resources and lack of assessment data. Industry perspectives on preparedness of recent graduates and relation to current educational practices showed that young engineers may lack critical skills on the proper use and interpretation of data and modeling analyses. The study also discusses potential solutions, such as development of sharing environments to facilitate exchange of data and resources, modular design to support adaptation and compatibility with existing curricula, collaborative efforts to produce shareable evaluation and assessment data, and potential opportunities for collaboration between academia and the professional industry to facilitate development and sustainability of educational innovations.

Students’ Perceived Priorities on Water as a Human Right, Natural Resource, and Multiple Goods

“…Our study and feedback from the invited teachers imply that teachers are likely motivated to adopt or develop new educational innovations stemming from self-efficacy, as also found out by Habib and Deshotel [65]. The survey proved useful in teaching, created a lot of discussion, and after the actual survey, it was later used in teaching, at least in Finland, Latvia, and Namibia.…”

How you teach changes who you reach: understanding the effect of teaching modality on student engagement, content interest, and learning in undergraduate hydrology

“…In this iteration, the final four weeks were modified to include: 1) traditional lecturing (Lecture), 2) a hydrological modeling exercise (Model), and 3) a group-based water infrastructure design evaluation (Design). The second two modalities followed recent recommendations in that they were student-led (Thompson et al, 2012), incorporated real-world data (Sanchez et al, 2016), field measurements (Van Loon, 2019), and simulations with a hydrological model currently used in industry for water resources planning and design (Habib & Deshotel, 2018;Ruddell & Wagener, 2015). The instructor remained the same across all modalities and instructor activities were recorded using a classroom time assessment tool (Fig.…”

“…These challenges necessitate a global workforce of engineers, scientists, and policymakers who are properly educated on both fundamental hydrological processes and the practical application of these concepts. A recent series of interviews with water resources professionals indicated that graduates lacked critical workforce skills (Habib & Deshotel, 2018). Expanding and strengthening the water resources workforce requires that we critically evaluate the capacity for teaching methods to both efficiently convey foundational ideas and inspire students to pursue future education, research, and work experience in hydrology.…”

Building an Online Learning Module for Satellite Remote Sensing Applications in Hydrologic Science

“…A need for improving hydrology and water resources education has been increasingly expressed by the community (e.g., References [19,20]) to use emerging data and modeling platforms, supported with effective educational approaches such as active-learning and real-world case studies. A recent study used a customer-discovery approach with qualitative surveys to examine factors that affect the potential sustainability and community-scale adoption of educational innovations [21]. The study identified key barriers against developing or adopting educational innovations in the field, including lack of time that instructors need to develop new modules, steep learning curves for instructors to adopt existing modules, the need for continuous updates and refurbishment of "static" material, and rigidity of material and locality of case studies to specific hydrologic basins and datasets.…”