HS
Hydrological Sciences

Teaching

Hybrid field courses – a teaching format beyond emergency solution?

October 21, 2020
Hybrid field courses – a teaching format beyond emergency solution?
Field work in front of the computer - a new reality?

Conducting field courses in times of a pandemic can be challenging. In our case, we had to cancel a planned field trip in economic geography that would have taken 19 students and two advisors to the Valle Maira in the Italian province of Cuneo in the Piemont. We had planned to spend 10 days in this region to develop ideas for sustainable development of peripheral mountain regions. Students would h ...[Read More]

Virtual Meetings: Hypnotic sedative or effective stimulant?

October 14, 2020
Virtual Meetings: Hypnotic sedative or effective stimulant?
Visualization of the 3 biggest fears of digital workshop moderators. (A. Björnsen, June 2020).

Some people claim that teaching online courses or virtual workshops is not very different from face-to-face meetings. In my experience, however, it is much harder to sneak away secretly from a half-occupied seminar room than to withdraw from a virtual meeting where you simply mute the speaker to work on your emails located only one mouse click away. And that’s not all! In contrast to physically pr ...[Read More]

A university class with a somewhat different approach

June 17, 2020
A university class with a somewhat different approach

We all know it: the heart of many Master level courses is the term paper, a scientific essay drawn from the students’ work during the semester. It is a way of teaching students not only the content, but also the methodology of scientific work.  And to keep them occupied during the semester break, of course. But last semester one of our courses took a slightly different approach. After writing a pr ...[Read More]

When the students are gone: Transition to online teaching

March 18, 2020
When the students are gone: Transition to online teaching
Credit: Renea Frey; https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10222326534695555&set=a.1945300515511&type=3&theater

With the ongoing Corona crisis, universities are closed and in-person classes are/were rapidly transitioning to online courses with only little time for preparation for instructors. Preparing online classes usually takes lots of effort and time, which is why we should probably all just release ourselves from too high expectation. Motivated by the ongoing discussion on Twitter about the challenges ...[Read More]