Interactive understanding of groundwater hydrology and hydrogeology – the iNUX project

Groundwater represents more than 97% of the globally available freshwater resources. Groundwater is situated in geological structures in the subsurface and is therefore not visible, difficult to characterize, and manage. As a consequence, it is often not adequately considered by authorities, the general public – and in education. However, teaching and learning Hydrogeology and Groundwater Management at universities, but also as a part of continuing education training for professionals, is essential to deal with future challenges. For this reason, it is important to use suitable teaching material to improve the understanding of the complex topic of groundwater among these target groups. The recent challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for digital and remote teaching. An ongoing Erasmus+ cooperation project named iNUX – interactive understanding of groundwater hydrogeology aims to address the need for digital teaching material. The project aims to achieve an interactive and digital learning environment in hydrogeology and groundwater management with a European but also global target of teachers and students.

Existing experience in teaching relevant groundwater subjects from highly reputable European universities will be used to develop interactive and digital teaching material focusing on basic and applied hydrogeology. The teaching material will cover basic theory in combination with field and laboratory applications in different European environments (Northern Europe, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean). The teaching material will comprise (1) various types of videos (e.g., field experiments, lab experiments, screencasts of calculations and software use), (2) interactive Jupyter notebooks that combine explanation with live code (e.g., based on Python), (3) various types of questions and problems that allow different assessments to enhance self-controlled learning of students. All materials are intended as open source and publicly available. The iNUX activities also comprise initiatives to establish interest groups to combine efforts towards larger pools of commonly developed digital teaching material (e.g., question pools) and to link with other activities like the 'Groundwater project' (https://gw-project.org/).