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

Work-in-Progress: The Platform-Independent Remote Monitoring System (PIRMS) for Situating Users in the Field VirtuallyA recent report on Challenges and Opportunities in the Hydrologic Sciences by the NationalAcademy of Sciences states that the solutions to the complex water-related challenges facingsociety today begin with education. Given the increasing levels of integration of technology intomodern society, how can this technology best be harnessed to educated people at variousacademic levels about water sustainability issues? The Platform-Independent Remote MonitoringSystem (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 oftheir choice. The PIRMS accomplished this via an HTML5-driven web-interface. One of thestrengths 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 theLabVIEW Enabled Watershed Assessment System (LEWAS) have been integrated with localgeographical data in the PIRMS environment in order to situated users within a small urbanwatershed virtually. Previous studies using exposure to the LEWAS showed increased levels ofstudent motivation. The current research investigates increases in student learning related towater sustainability topics. Bloom’s Revised Cognitive Taxonomy is used to link components ofPIRMS to water sustainability topics on different learning levels. Using the framework ofsituated learning, longitudinal true-experimental and pre-test-post-test quasi-experimentaldesigns are applied to students in a senior level undergraduate course and freshmen engineeringcommunity college courses, respectively, in order to compare student learning from physicalfield visits, virtual field visits via PIRMS and/or virtual field visits via pre-recorded videos. Inaddition to these physical and/or virtual field visits, all students are given LEWAS imagery filesand measurement data in spreadsheet formats. Pre- and post-test assessments entail the studentswriting narrative responses to prompts. These narrative responses are assessed using rubrics tolook for increases in student learning. Preliminary results are presented. This work is ongoing.