EOSC 329

Official course description

Quantitative Groundwater Hydrology: Introduction to theory of groundwater flow; flow nets; regional groundwater resource evaluation; well hydraulics; role of groundwater in geologic processes, case studies.

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OCESE project objectives

Original intentions were to introduce Jupyter notebooks and/or interactive dashboard apps. Both options would facilitate exploration of concepts and data sets.

Actions taken

EOSC329 has not yet (as of end of May 2023) benefitted from the planned improvements. The main reason is that instructors have been either over-extended (during COVID years) or temporary sessional instructors filling in while EOAS faculty were on leave.

Dashboards built for eoas325 could be incorporated into classroom work or assignments with very little effort on part of instructors. These dashboard apps (see the “Geology and hydrogeology section of our Dashboards page) are designed for a beginner’s course on hydrogeology.

Jupyter notebooks should be ideal for this course because enrolment is limited to engineering or geophysics students who will have gained programming skills in either EOSC 211 or EOSC 213 and those skills should be put to use before students graduate.

Lessons learned

This could be considered an ideal course to gain opensource computing resources and learning activities. However incorporating appropariate learning goals, resources, learning activities and assessments requires an instructing team that can commit to making appropriate and sustainable changes. During the three years of OCESE, either the priniciple instructor was away, COVID was causing all teaching energy to focus on pivoting to online learning, or a sessional instructor was teaching the course for only one term.

Incorporating Jupyter notebooks, and using some dashboards such as those used in EOSC325 is highly recommended, particularly since this hydrogeology course represents an ideal opportunity for engineering students to apply computing skills learned in their second year.