Critical thinking for advanced urban water management

For the new MSc degree program for Environmental Engineering we decided to develop a novel course «Advanced Urban Water Management» (UWMx). Besides learning the needed engineering tools, the students should also learn critical thinking, decision making in a complex environment, and learn the ability to deal with lack of data and ill-defined problems. We would like to achieve this with a 6 ECTS course, fully designed as flipped classroom. The second didactic element would be the focus on a real case study (= data deficits, poorly defined, missing information, complex environment) where all the necessary engineering tools are introduced and applied. The final result of the semester is a report that makes a recommendation for the measures to be taken to minimize water pollution and to prevent urban flooding. The case is set up so that the results are open and that different groups will reach different solutions.
The innovedum project aims at supporting the development of the study material and the didactical build up of the ‹exercises› to support the «flipped classroom» concept for a major course.

• Overall high quality end of semester report by students, recommending 3 – 4 measures to reduce water pollution and flood risk for the application case.
• High student satisfaction with the course
• High student-student and student-expert interactions

Full semester of «flipped classroom» and «project oriented learning» on a real application case with real data.

There was a mismatch between the amount of work the students put into the task and the time they took (had) to prepare the theory (e.g. reading papers) for the next task. The volume of the tasks should be better aligned with the available time, so the students have enough time to seriously prepare for the next lecture.

Will follow by the end of the semester

• Group formation is of high importance. Make sure that knowledge and abilities are evenly distributed (especially if the MSc course builds on knowledge from BSc). To use a questionnaire about the students’ background is a valuable possibility to form the teams.
• Team building and monitoring of team functioning is crucial. Take out time to review how the team is functioning. Provide the students with a useful vocabulary to communicate their thoughts and feelings about role and work distribution (e.g. Belbin team roles).
• Clear structure of tasks is the key for student centred learning. It should be very clear from the instructions what the students have to reach and what resources they can use. Additionally, the lecturer should check often enough if the students are on track, e.g. with a short quizzing or clear (written) milestones.