Organising an international summer school from scratch, towards establishing the traditionally held one – HydRoData Summer School

The first international summer school HydRoData for Master and PhD students was held in September 2023 at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering. The summer school was organised by the UNESCO Chair on Water-related Disaster Risk Reduction, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and Slovenian national IHP programme. The focus of the summer school was data in hydrology. The programme topics included data acquisition, data manipulation and analysis, data curation, data communication, FAIR data principles, and introduction to R programming for hydrology.

The teaching-learning process was structured as a combination of lectures, fieldwork, group work, ICT supported learning etc. In the scope of the summer school, participants partook the measurements of hydrological processes on several experimental plots, and visited meteorological station and radar during the field trip. To wrap everything up, the participants had the opportunity to show what they have learned in the competitive quiz in R programming.

The official part of the summer school was enriched by social events, enabling the participants to network and get to know each other in more relaxed set-up. Social events included ice breaker trivia quiz pizza party, and a visit to traditional Slovenian tavern.

The number of the applications exceeded the number of the available spots, and regardless on the new spots opening, a selection process was made. Finally, the 26 attending participants of 21 nationalities came from 19 universities. According to the feedback questionnaire, the participants evaluated the summer school execution with the average satisfaction grade 9.27 (out of 10). Here, the participant’s feedbacks that will assist in the improvement of the learning procedure, topic selection, schedule etc. will be presented more in detail along with the establishment and realization of the summer school.

Since the first edition of the summer school showed to be successful, the second HydRoData summer school is announced, with applications already open. The HydRoData summer school 2024 will be held from 2 September to 6 September in Ljubljana, Slovenia. More information and registration form can be found: https://www.unesco-floods.eu/unesco-floods-summer-school/.