Lessons from the world’s longest lockdown for online hydrogeology education

When COVID-19 swept across the world in 2020, university teaching was upended almost overnight, and few disciplines felt the disruption more acutely than hydrogeology. A field-based science built on hands-on measurement, laboratory work, and numerical modeling was suddenly forced into a fully online format with only days of preparation. A new essay published in Hydrogeology Journal by Matthew Currell of Griffith University and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, offers one of the most detailed retrospective accounts of that transformation, drawing on two years of teaching groundwater coursework in the city that endured the longest continuous pandemic lockdown on the planet. The lessons it contains reach far beyond Australia, striking at a question that now confronts every earth science department: can a screen ever truly replace the aquifer?

Melbourne’s experience was extraordinary even by pandemic standards. The city was subject to public health restrictions prohibiting people from gathering for work or study for a cumulative total of 262 days across 2020 and 2021, the longest continuous lockdown anywhere in the world. For Currell, who had coordinated two hydrogeology coursework units with between 20 and 55 students since 2013, the implications were immediate. The shift to fully online delivery occurred just before the first week of the Australian academic year in March 2020, leaving almost no time to prepare. Like most of his colleagues worldwide, he was ill-equipped for the task, with little prior experience in delivering fully online content and assessment, and was simultaneously juggling care responsibilities, social isolation, and an intermittently unstable internet connection while teaching from home.

The technical response to the crisis reveals both the ingenuity and the limits of emergency online pedagogy. Rather than recycling pre-existing lecture recordings, Currell chose to rebuild his courses around livestreamed, recorded lectures and tutorial sessions, supplemented with new video content designed for viewing outside scheduled class times. For the introductory unit, the traditional weekly lecture and tutorial structure was retained. The advanced course adopted weekly ‘lectorial’ sessions for five weeks, followed by a three-day online intensive focused on solving groundwater flow and solute transport problems using the industry-standard MODFLOW-MT3D modeling codes. During the mid-year academic break in 2020, special permission allowed the instructor to work with a professional videographer to produce a 60-minute video demonstrating groundwater concepts using a benchtop model of a heterogeneous layered aquifer system, in which dyes injected at different locations trace flow paths and solute movement.

That video production, born of necessity, turned out to be a genuine pedagogical improvement. The format permitted close-up shots and time-lapse photography that had never been possible in a live classroom demonstration, allowing students to see the effects of changing hydraulic conductivity and hydraulic gradient on groundwater flow paths, solute transport, and ground-surface water interaction in unprecedented detail. The video was linked directly to an assessment task testing conceptual understanding, and it stands as a concrete example of how the pandemic accelerated the creation of digital teaching resources that can permanently enrich hydrogeology instruction when they are carefully planned and curated with adequate time and funding.

Not every element of the coursework translated so smoothly. Numerical modeling sessions, previously run as five full days of in-person practical work using MODFLOW and MT3D to build three-dimensional flow and transport models, were compressed into three days to avoid digital fatigue among students, supported by self-paced video tutorials. Small-group collaboration was salvaged through Microsoft Teams breakout rooms, which allowed students to share developing models and let the instructor troubleshoot individual problems remotely. Students appreciated the effort, but their feedback was unambiguous about the trade-off. One student reported that it took far longer to work through MODFLOW issues alone online than it would have to physically show someone the problem and receive immediate help. Both students and instructor concluded that direct, in-person guidance in building and debugging numerical models remains preferable even when screen sharing and breakout rooms are available.

The most profound loss, however, was the field trip. Before the pandemic, each semester of the introductory course included a full-day excursion to groundwater monitoring sites across a small coastal sedimentary aquifer historically affected by saltwater intrusion driven by high rates of seasonal extraction for irrigation. Students measured groundwater levels, collected samples, observed physicochemical characteristics, and recorded lithological features in soil and aquifer material, gradually assembling a working conceptual model of the system. In 2020 the trip could not run, and students instead completed desktop research using maps, reports, and hydrographs published online. While this built valuable skills in desk-based hydrogeological assessment, fundamental practical competencies that most students would encounter nowhere else in their degree simply could not be taught. The field trip was reinstated in 2021, and the instructor’s analysis aligns with a growing body of evidence that virtual field trips can complement but never replace in-person field training.

Assessment practices underwent their own controversial transformation. Supervised in-person examinations, the largest component of assessment before the pandemic, were replaced with 24-hour take-home online exams. Currell’s experience echoes findings from across the university sector: students typically undertook far less revision in preparation, relying on accessing information on demand during the exam rather than learning methods in advance and applying them to problems. The result was relatively poor exam performance and, arguably, a shallower understanding of the material. The concern has only intensified with the arrival of generative artificial intelligence, which makes unsupervised online assessment increasingly difficult to police. Yet a 2025 study by Newton and Draper found that more than 75 percent of surveyed UK universities were still using unsupervised online examinations during 2023 and 2024, raising what the essay describes as serious questions about quality assurance in higher education.

Perhaps surprisingly, the data on engagement told a more nuanced story. Comparing attendance figures and digital analytics tracking unique downloads and views of online material across pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic years, Currell found that lecture and class attendance were broadly similar across all formats. The availability of online material, often promoted by universities as a way to broaden access for busy or remote students, had little impact on overall engagement numbers in this case. What mattered was structure: the highest levels of genuine engagement, as opposed to mere attendance, occurred wherever students were encouraged to discuss key ideas and case studies in groups and contribute to class discussions in a structured way, whether through breakout sessions in video call software or in a traditional classroom. The persistent challenge online was reaching quieter students who chose not to activate their cameras or microphones, and the social isolation imposed by lockdowns demonstrably limited the peer-to-peer interaction that underpins deep learning.

Student satisfaction ratings tell a story of resilience with a measurable cost. The two courses achieved overall satisfaction scores of 94.7 and 94.1 percent during fully online delivery, with students praising the efficiency of the transition and the use of real-world case studies. Yet both figures represented a slight decline from the 100 percent satisfaction recorded in the two years prior, a dip the essay attributes in part to the online engagement fatigue documented by researchers as the pandemic wore on. Qualitative comments revealed no serious concerns about overall course quality, but repeatedly flagged the modeling tutorials and the absence of fieldwork and face-to-face collaboration as the weak points of the online experience, with one student noting that a friend dropped the course after losing personal connections when teaching moved online.

Beneath these pedagogical questions lies a sharper equity problem that gives the essay its title. Currell’s experience during the pandemic was that many students, contrary to the stereotype of the well-equipped digital native, lacked the IT hardware, software, connectivity, or simply a stable, disturbance-free space in which to study effectively. University grant schemes sometimes helped with basic equipment but almost never addressed the need for an adequate working environment. This digital inequality, which researchers identify as a pressing and unresolved issue across tertiary education, threatens to create a divide in groundwater education precisely because many of the world’s most urgent groundwater crises affect low-income communities whose aspiring hydrogeologists have the least access to quality learning infrastructure. Currell argues that traditional classroom formats offer a standardized mechanism to level the playing field for many aspects of hydrogeology education, while initiatives such as The Groundwater Project, which publishes free online textbooks in multiple languages, help ensure that students who cannot attend in-person classes are not excluded. As universities continue to expand online offerings in pursuit of new audiences, the essay’s central warning is clear: online tools can enrich groundwater education, but only if the field’s irreplaceable practical, field-based, and interpersonal dimensions, and the students least served by digital delivery, are deliberately protected.

Subject of Research: The transition of hydrogeology education to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for teaching quality and equity

Article Title: Preventing a groundwater divide: Ensuring quality hydrogeology education for all in the age of online coursework following the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Currell, M. (2026). Preventing a groundwater divide: Ensuring quality hydrogeology education for all in the age of online coursework following the COVID-19 pandemic. Hydrogeology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-026-03162-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10040-026-03162-8

Keywords: hydrogeology education, groundwater, online learning, COVID-19 pandemic, fieldwork, MODFLOW, digital inequality, numerical modeling, virtual field trips, assessment, Australia, higher education