EGU22-6343
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-6343
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Self-guided smartphone excursions in university teaching – experiences from exploring ‘Water in the City’ 

Jan Seibert1,2, Franziska Schwarzenbach1, and Ilja van Meerveld1
Jan Seibert et al.
  • 1University of Zurich, Department of Geography, Zürich, Switzerland (jan.seibert@geo.uzh.ch)
  • 2Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

The pandemic has changed teaching dramatically. Similar to many other university teachers, we were faced with an unprecedented situation when the university closed in spring 2020, a few weeks after the start of the semester. In this presentation, we report and discuss our experiences from teaching a first-year Bachelor level introductory course in Hydrology with almost 200 students. In particular, we focus on the excursion for this course. We were in the fortunate position that we had started to develop a new 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, which had to be cancelled. We used the self-guided excursion again in 2021.The student feedback was overall very positive, and therefore we plan to continue to use the excursion in the coming years. In this presentation, we describe the excursion, discuss the experiences of the students, and present materials and ideas that could be useful for similar excursions at other universities.

How to cite: Seibert, J., Schwarzenbach, F., and van Meerveld, I.: Self-guided smartphone excursions in university teaching – experiences from exploring ‘Water in the City’ , EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-6343, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-6343, 2022.