Work-in-Progress: The Platform-Independent Remote Monitoring System (PIRMS) for Situating Users in the Field Virtually

A recent report on Challenges and Opportunities in the Hydrologic Sciences by the National Academy of Sciences states that the solutions to the complex water-related challenges facing society today begin with education. Given the increasing levels of integration of technology into modern society, how can this technology best be harnessed to educated people at various academic levels about water sustainability issues? The Platform-Independent Remote Monitoring System (PIRMS) interactively delivers integrated live and/or historical remote system data (visual, environmental, geographical, etc.) to end users regardless of the hardware (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.) and software (Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.) platforms of their choice. The PIRMS accomplishes this via an HTML5-driven web-interface. One of the strengths of such a design is the idea of anywhere, anytime access to live system data. In this research, weather and water quantity and quality data and time-stamped imagery from the LabVIEW Enabled Watershed Assessment System (LEWAS) have been integrated with local geographical data in the PIRMS environment in order to situate users within a small urban watershed virtually. Previous studies using exposure to the LEWAS showed increased levels of student motivation. The current research investigates increases in student learning related to water sustainability topics. Bloom’s Revised Cognitive Taxonomy is used to link components of PIRMS to water sustainability topics on different learning levels. Using the framework of situated learning, longitudinal true-experimental and pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental designs are applied to students in a senior level undergraduate course and freshmen engineering community college courses, respectively, in order to compare student learning from physical field visits, virtual field visits via PIRMS and/or virtual field visits via pre-recorded videos. In addition to these physical and/or virtual field visits, all students are given LEWAS imagery files and measurement data in spreadsheet formats. Preand post-test assessments entail the students writing narrative responses to prompts. These narrative responses are assessed using rubrics to look for increases in student learning. Preliminary results are presented. This work is ongoing.