The research team set out to examine how imperialism is portrayed in open educational resources, commonly known as OERs, which are freely accessible teaching materials that teachers download, adapt, and distribute. Because these materials are often produced by trusted names such as PBS or C3 Teachers, educators frequently adopt them with limited scrutiny. Yonas described the typical scenario: a high school teacher planning three or four different courses needs to cover imperialism in an upcoming unit, searches Google for preexisting resources, and downloads whatever appears credible. With little time for deep vetting, teachers may assume that a recognizable institutional name guarantees quality. The study tested that assumption by systematically analyzing 46 sets of commonly used OERs designed for middle and high school social studies instruction.

The results were unambiguous. According to the study, 85.7 percent of the primary sources included in these materials were recorded by colonizers, with very few sources contributed by colonized peoples themselves. The authors wrote that OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, frequently favor Eurocentric narratives, and minimize colonial voices. In doing so, the researchers argue, these materials normalize imperial conquest and perpetuate what they describe as systemic silences, gaps in the historical record that render the experiences and resistance of colonized populations nearly invisible. For a field that has spent decades working to diversify its sources and narratives, the prevalence of one-sided materials in widely used digital resources represents a significant setback.

Beyond the imbalance in sources, the study documented the prevalence of what the researchers call a balance sheet approach to teaching imperialism. In this framework, students are asked to weigh the pros and cons of colonization, essentially debating whether imperial expansion produced net benefits or harms. The researchers found that this approach was not uniform across platforms. They analyzed four: OER Project, PBS, DIG, and C3 Teachers. None of the DIG resources employed a balance sheet approach, while OER Project and PBS used it relatively infrequently. Every single C3 Teachers resource examined, however, included one. The variation suggests that platform-level editorial decisions, rather than isolated lesson design choices, may drive how imperialism is framed for students.

The specific questions embedded in these balance sheet exercises illustrate the researchers’ concerns. Examples included asking students whether Hawai’i should be sovereign, whether American expansion abroad was justified, and requiring students to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the French occupation of Vietnam. Jackson argued that such questions are inappropriate on multiple levels. They invite high school students to debate whether people have a right to exist freely or whether colonizing another nation can be justified, placing fundamental matters of human rights and self-determination on the table as subjects of casual classroom debate. He noted that this framing invites moralizing and shallow, uncomplex thought rather than rigorous historical reasoning, and that it treats sovereignty as an open question rather than an established principle.

The researchers also emphasized that the balance sheet approach is academically inappropriate because it diverges from how professional historians actually work. Historians do not, as a matter of practice, weigh the supposed benefits of imperial conquest against its costs, and recent scholarship is extremely critical of pedagogical frameworks that do so. Furthermore, the approach reduces history to hypotheticals: it is impossible to determine how life in colonized regions would have unfolded had imperialism never occurred, so asking students to calculate what colonization contributed becomes an exercise in counterfactual speculation rather than evidence-based analysis. The authors contend that this method misrepresents both the discipline of history and the moral reality of empire.

Not every resource examined drew the researchers’ criticism. Yonas highlighted the OER Project as a positive example, noting that it does a strong job of providing lessons that include sources from a range of perspectives and of asking questions appropriate for students, such as how colonized peoples resisted imperial rule. The researchers argue that elevating materials of this kind serves two purposes. First, it steers practicing teachers toward resources that handle difficult topics with balance and rigor. Second, it offers a model that can be incorporated into pre-service teacher preparation, training future educators to identify the shortcomings in the materials they encounter before those materials ever reach a classroom.

The study fills a notable gap in the research literature. Although open educational resources have become a fixture of modern classrooms, little research has been conducted on their actual content, the sources they draw upon, or their overall quality. Yonas has previously studied how states mandate the teaching of difficult topics such as genocide and how early-career teachers approach such subjects, and she argues that understanding the materials themselves is a critical piece of the puzzle. Without systematic evaluation, schools and districts cannot know whether the free resources they approve or the websites their teachers frequent meet the standards of accuracy and inclusivity that educators and families expect.

The broader implications extend well beyond the topic of imperialism. As the economics of education push schools toward digital and open materials, the mechanisms that once guaranteed a baseline of quality, such as editorial review at established textbook publishers, are being bypassed. The Kansas study demonstrates that even resources bearing the names of respected institutions can embed problematic framings and skewed source selections. The researchers hope their work will encourage schools, teachers, and teacher educators to scrutinize online materials more carefully, to favor resources that include colonized perspectives and historically sound questions, and ultimately to ensure that all students have access to high-quality, reliable materials when learning about the most difficult topics in human history.

Subject of Research: How open educational resources portray imperialism in middle and high school social studies

Article Title: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions

Article References: Study finds online educational resources present imperialism in positive light, put students in inappropriate discussions. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: imperialism, open educational resources, social studies education, curriculum, colonialism, balance sheet approach, University of Kansas, teaching materials, history education, OER Project, PBS, C3 Teachers

The research team, led by Thomas Reimann of TUD Dresden University of Technology together with Eileen Poeter of the Colorado School of Mines, Ty Ferré of the University of Arizona, Rudolf Liedl, and colleagues across Germany, Sweden, Austria, Spain, Canada, and the United States, set out to tackle a stubborn pedagogical problem. Hydrogeology demands an unusually broad set of competencies: field and laboratory methods, plus quantitative analysis grounded in advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It is typically taught inside geology, environmental science, or civil engineering programs, where it often receives less emphasis than other topics. Meanwhile, the subsurface processes at the heart of the discipline, including recharge, groundwater flow, and solute transport, occur across spatial and temporal scales that resist direct observation, forcing learners to reason about an invisible system through conceptual and mathematical representations.

Traditional teaching tools, from lectures to problem sets to laboratory demonstrations, convey theoretical foundations well but struggle to represent dynamic, hidden system behavior. Field courses and hands-on laboratory sessions are highly valued by learners, but access to suitable sites, equipment, and facilities is frequently constrained by cost, logistics, and availability, particularly in continuing education and distance learning. The authors argue that this is precisely where the ongoing digital transformation of higher education, combined with accessible hardware and the maturation of open-source scientific software, changes the equation.

The study provides an overview of interactive applications built primarily with Python embedded in HTML/CSS or JavaScript, and introduces the frameworks used to develop and deploy them. Three technologies anchor the approach. Jupyter Notebooks combine executable code, explanatory text, and graphics within a single interactive document, making them ideal for stepwise exploration in which learners connect equations, algorithms, and outputs. Streamlit, a newer dashboard-oriented framework, simplifies browser-based deployment so educators can build polished applications with sliders, input fields, and integrated text without exposing source code to users. Bokeh, a Python and JavaScript visualization library, supports both client-side and server-side callbacks, enabling lightweight, responsive interactive plots that can be embedded in existing web pages or run as standalone documents that work entirely offline.

Why Python? The language is free, platform-independent, and backed by more than three decades of development and an ecosystem of over seven million packages, many of them maintained with long-term sustainability by organizations such as NumFOCUS, which sponsors core scientific libraries including NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas. That maturity, the authors note, removes licensing and resource barriers that often limit the spread of specialized educational software, and lets educators extend existing applications with just a few lines of code to add data, modify equations, or adapt visualizations. The applications read standard hydrogeology formats, from CSV files to shapefiles and rasters, and are hosted openly on GitHub under permissive CC BY-SA 4.0 licenses, allowing free reuse, modification, and even commercial use with attribution.

The showcase of applications demonstrates how the frameworks translate theory into intuition. The Pumping Test Module, developed for The Groundwater Project, walks learners through radial flow to wells and classical analytical solutions such as those of Theis, Hantush-Jacob, and Neuman. Users drag sliders to vary transmissivity, storativity, or pumping rate and watch drawdown curves respond instantly, building a feel for aquifer behavior and parameter sensitivity. The module includes synthetic datasets, real field measurements from a Swedish pumping test, and an option to upload the user’s own data, so the same interface serves both as a teaching tool and a lightweight professional analysis instrument. Its extended version shows how analytical solutions can be used to verify numerical groundwater models, linking theory, implementation, and model evaluation in one environment.

A companion Boundary Condition Module confronts one of the most abstract aspects of groundwater modeling: how conceptual boundaries such as specified head, specified flux, and mixed conditions are implemented in numerical codes like MODFLOW. Interactive flow-versus-head plots respond as learners adjust hydraulic heads, conductance, and boundary-specific values, while embedded exercises and automated self-assessment questions guide them through model design decisions. Other resources widen the scope further. The interactive groundwater book, developed at TU Dresden, compiles more than thirty Jupyter notebooks into a complete graduate-level course hosted on GitHub pages, in continuous classroom use since 2021. A Bokeh-based Van Genuchten Explorer visualizes the relationship between soil type, water content, and matric potential, while Green–Ampt infiltration apps, available as both Jupyter Notebooks and Streamlit apps, let students discover how infiltration rates start high and asymptotically approach the saturated hydraulic conductivity, with curves they can save and compare across parameter settings.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of impact comes from the mine dewatering exercise, a Streamlit app designed for undergraduates with little or no hydrology background. Within a single class period, students without the theoretical apparatus for conventional pumping test analysis could run sensitivity analyses and grasp how the shape of a drawdown cone changes with transmissivity, storativity, and pumping rate. By the third lecture, they were assigning costs to drawdown and benefits to dewatering, weighing tradeoffs among pumping scenarios that affected stakeholders at different distances from the well. As Ty Ferré described the experience, the Streamlit apps lowered the technical bar, allowing students to consider the impacts of pumping on multiple stakeholders and to spend more time thinking about the multiple stakeholder optimization problem. Students highlighted that the browser-based format meant nothing had to be installed on their own computers.

The apps have been in real classrooms since 2019, embedded in the master-level groundwater module at TU Dresden, in bachelor and master hydrogeology courses at the University of Gothenburg, and since 2024 at the SYMPLE School of Hydrological Modeling. Three usage modes have emerged: synchronous teaching, where instructors manipulate interactive figures live during lectures; asynchronous self-paced learning, where step-by-step explanations and automated feedback accommodate heterogeneous learning speeds; and professional development, where practitioners use the modules as compact analytical tools. The pedagogical structure follows Bloom’s taxonomy, addressing knowledge and comprehension at the undergraduate level and progressing to interpretation, synthesis, and evaluation for graduate and professional learners. Student feedback reported in the study points to the immediacy of visual feedback and the ability to experiment with parameters as key strengths, while instructors found the tools effective for surfacing and correcting misconceptions early.

The challenges that remain are largely practical rather than conceptual: stable internet access, server capacity during large simultaneous use, and the need for educators to frame interactive exercises within clear learning objectives rather than leaving them as stand-alone demonstrations. The authors also see room for growth, including micro-credential integration, learning-management-system compatibility, multilingual translations, and systematic evaluation of long-term learning outcomes. The deeper promise, they conclude, extends beyond hydrogeology. Because the tools are open-source and platform-independent, they offer unrestricted access for institutions with limited budgets and a transferable template for other engineering and natural science fields. At a moment when groundwater scarcity is intensifying worldwide and AI-driven workflows are reshaping scientific practice, a generation of learners who can both understand invisible aquifers and write the code that models them may prove to be one of the most consequential outcomes of open education.

Subject of Research: Interactive open-source educational applications for hydrogeology and groundwater management education

Article Title: Interactive educational applications for hydrogeology and groundwater management

Article References: Reimann, T., Poeter, E., Ferré, T., Merritt, G., Giese, M., Wallenberg, N., Barthel, R., Grießer, E., Birk, S., Bertran, O., Fernàndez-Garcia, D., Yadav, P. K., & Liedl, R. (2026). Interactive educational applications for hydrogeology and groundwater management. Hydrogeology Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-026-03149-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10040-026-03149-5

Keywords: groundwater, hydrogeology, Python, open educational resources, interactive learning, Streamlit, Jupyter, Bokeh, groundwater modeling, pumping test, MODFLOW, water education