Groundwater Interactive: Interdisciplinary Web-Based Software Incorporating New Learning Methodologies and Technologies

Groundwater related courses are offered through several colleges at Virginia Tech. These classes enroll a diverse group of students with varied academic backgrounds and educational levels. Though these classes emphasize different aspects of groundwater resources, they lack a unified approach in instructional materials and learning methodologies for knowledge they do share. The goals of this research are to lessen the impact of variable student backgrounds and to better integrate the courses to improve teaching and learning, through the development of a multi-tiered, interdisciplinary website, Groundwater Interactive (GWI). GWI, as an educational technology, employs a variety of interactive multimedia. The primary educational components of the website include interactive and graphical models and quizzes, and a student-authored primer. An implementation strategy based on experiential and cooperative learning models is developed for application of the GWI tool in the classroom. An assessment methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of these new learning methods and techniques was also developed, but was not implemented as part of this work.