Instructor Stories and Adaptations

These resources describe how the module was adapted for use in different settings. We hope these stories inspire your own use of the module and give you insight into how to adapt the materials for your classroom.

Steve Burian: Water Sustainability in Cities at the University of Utah. The module was used over a three-week period in an introductory undergraduate general education course. The course, titled Water and Sustainability, was part of the Block Sustainability General Education sequence and was part of the required courses to acquire the Undergraduate Sustainability Certificate. The course had six students enrolled from several disciplines at the freshman and sophomore level. The course type (freshman and small) provided a different setting to apply the module materials. The module was adapted slightly for the freshman level students by (1) reducing activities in Units 3, 4, and 8 and (2) reducing expectations on deliverables of in-class assignments and the project.

Manoj Jha: Water Sustainability in Cities at North Carolina A&T University. I used this module in the second half of the senior level design course (all units via nine classes). Unit 9 was used as a term project as a means for the assessment of the entire module. The class had 13 students with backgrounds mostly in civil engineering and some in environmental sciences. The course is designed to educate students interested in water infrastructures with the concepts of fundamental design methods and also supports students with the knowledge and practice examples for the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) licensing exam. It meets departmental goals of providing students with design experiences of water infrastructures.

Gigi Richard: Water Sustainability in Cities at Colorado Mesa University. The Water Sustainability in Cities Module was implemented for the last three weeks of a 200-level environmental geology course with 14 students. The course is a required course for environmental geology majors, and a restricted elective for geology majors. The students varied from sophomore to senior level in the geosciences with the majority of them being sophomores and juniors. The module content had to be reduced to accommodate nine 50-minute class periods, instead of 75-minute class periods, so Unit 6 was not used. The module was used in lieu of the usual coverage of water resources in the course. The summative assessment (Unit 9) was used as the final exam with an individual essay followed by group presentations. Also, the class does not meet in a computer classroom, so additional adaptations were made to adjust for the lack of computers. The flipped classroom approach was well-received by the students. The students were especially engaged during the classroom activities.

Marshall Shepherd: Water Sustainability in Cities at the University of Georgia. The module was used over two weeks in an Applied Climatology in the Urban Environment course with 16 students (a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students). The background of the students in the course included geography, remote sensing, atmospheric sciences, business, and planning. This course was intended to draw on a wide range of experience, but most students take the course for their geography degree or Atmospheric Sciences Certificate requirements. The course explored past, current, and emerging textbooks and literature to introduce (1) fundamental concepts of the urban-climate system, (2) observational and modeling strategies for studying the urban-climate system, and (3) context for how urban-climate system feedbacks fit into the climate change discussion.

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