Self-guided smartphone excursions in university teaching—experiences from exploring “Water in the City”

Like many other university teachers, we were faced with an unprecedented situation in spring 2020, when we had to cancel on-site teaching and excursions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, we were in the fortunate position that we had already started to develop a smartphone-based self-guided excursion on the topic of “Water in the City”. We accelerated this development and used it to replace the traditional group excursion in our Bachelor level introductory course in Hydrology and Climatology. The excursion of this course is visited by around 150 students each year. Because the student feedback was overall very positive, we used the self-guided excursion again in 2021 and plan to continue to use it in the coming years. In this paper, we describe the excursion, discuss the experiences of the students and ourselves, and present recommendations and ideas that could be useful for similar excursions at other universities

Getting your money's worth: Testing the value of data for hydrological model calibration

Despite the big data era, observational data continue to be a limiting factor in the environmental sciences. To collect the most informative field data, studies on the value of data are essential. This article describes a model‐based approach to assess the value of data. While we discuss the approach for hydrological model calibration, the approach is applicable across the environmental sciences. The overall goal is to provide guidance on optimal data collection strategies, that is, what to measure, where, and when

Self-Guided Smartphone Excursions in University Teaching-Experiences From Exploring "Water in the City"

Like many other university teachers, we were faced with an unprecedented situation in spring 2020, when we had to cancel on-site teaching and excursions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, we were in the fortunate position that we had already started to develop a smartphone-based self-guided excursion on the topic of "Water in the City". We accelerated this development and used it to replace the traditional group excursion in our Bachelor level introductory course in Hydrology and Climatology. The excursion of this course is visited by around 150 students each year. Because the student feedback was overall very positive, we used the self-guided excursion again in 2021 and plan to continue to use it in the coming years. In this paper, we describe the excursion, discuss the experiences of the students and ourselves, and present recommendations and ideas that could be useful for similar excursions at other universities