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

Abstract

COVID-19 caused many disruptions, not only in society, but also in university education, including in hydrology and water-related sciences. Taking part in an academic teaching training course at Uppsala University during COVID-19, we got curious about how COVID-19 might have impacted European water education. Consequently, we chose to investigate this aspect in the mandatory project of the course by conducting an online survey. In this paper, we communicate the results of the survey and reflect (hold up a mirror to water education) on how the teaching of hydrology and water-related sciences changed due to COVID-19. The answers of 28 respondents, working in the field of hydrology at different universities across Europe, showed that in the pre-COVID-19 classroom lectures, laboratory work and fieldwork were commonly used teaching formats in courses with 10 to more than 40 students. These results agreed with those found in the literature. The occurrence of COVID-19 forced hydrological education to suddenly move from classroom to online teaching, which was possible thanks to the available digital tools and technical infrastructure. The practiced online teaching format remained lectures. Most of the respondents (>40%) reported not using classroom assessment techniques to gauge the students' performances. In addition, a loss of human interaction in the online environment was noticeable. Hence, whether students reached their learning outcomes during distance teaching was largely unknown. The most affected learning activities were the ones that could not be moved to online teaching, such as laboratory work and fieldwork. As a result, comprehensive hydrological knowledge might be missing for at least several cohorts of hydrologists. In this way, COVID-19 caused a secondary effect on society which needs skills in solving future challenges such as water management in a changing climate. Next to negative aspects, we observed positive COVID-19 aspects; for example, the hydrology community explored novel teaching formats and shared teaching material and experiences online. COVID-19 forced hydrology teachers to explore, improvise, and be creative to continue teaching. Hydrology can use this experience to learn from and modernize hydrology education by developing a lesson design suited for the online environment, including best practices and making practical and "exotic"non-traditional teaching formats accessible to all hydrology and water students.