Teachers' and Students' Requirements on Geomatics and Geoinformatics Education

Transcription

1 Teachers' and Students' Requirements on Geomatics and Geoinformatics Education Otakar Čerba, Karel Charvát*, Karel Jedlička, Jakub Šilhavý, Karel Janečka University of West Bohemia, *Czech Center for Science and Society (Czech Republic) Abstract The technical education (including the education on the field of geomatics, geoinformatics and geoinformation technologies) is changing very rapidly. It is connected not only to technological development but also on new pedagogical methods and principles (and technologies) and need of lifelong learning. This paper tries to compare the two basic views on the educational questions. On the one hand there are learners and students, on the second hand there is very important opinion of teachers and training experts. To comparison the experiences of finished projects and projects in progress will be used. The University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and Czech Center for Science and Society (as well as other partners) have been cooperating and are cooperating on the various projects connected to educational activities such as CentraLab, SDI-EDU, Habitas, Metaschool or Multimedia Geomatics. Mainly the technological solutions (e.g. portals, multimedia materials, metadata) of above-mentioned projects will be introduced in this paper. Also the feedback from the students will be allowed for. 1. Introduction The technical education (including the education on the field of geomatics, geoinformatics and geoinformation technologies) is changing very rapidly. In cartographic or GIS conferences the following requirements on universities have been heard We need students being able to work with concrete software and to know and keep out methodology. These requirements of practise are in contrast with the traditional role of universities to provide not only professional skills but also education in general. The paradoxes of various views on universities are described in detail in the presentation The Changing Role of Universities in our Societies. A European Perspective. by Pierre de Maret [5]. Also the famous book The Theory of Miseducation (Theorie der Unbildung) [4] by Austrian philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann offers very interesting and critical opinion of the current university education. This paper does not want to cover such global question. This paper tries to compare the two crucial views on the educational questions. On the one hand there are learners and students (affected by employers and their needs), on the second hand there is very important opinion of teachers and training experts. The paper is focused on one specific field of technical sciences geomatics and geoinformatics. Most of the described activities are realized in the cooperation of the Department of Geomatics (gis.zcu.cz) in the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (UWB; Czech Republic and Czech Center of Science and Society (CCSS;

2 The paper is divided into three main parts. At first the requirements of geomatics students and lecturers are introduced. After that the our projects and their connections to education are mentioned. Lastly the conclusion and summary of current situation are described. 2. Requirements The conflict between requirements of students and teachers represents the current situation in the education process not only in eduction. Students (above all the student of combine form of study programmes or lifelong education) want only to learn such activities directly connected with their job. The teachers want to support the traditional role of universities complex education with interconnections to other sciences. The core of this section is composed of two part. The first part shows the summary of students' requirements which was created in the project Multimedia Geomatics (the detail description of the project is in the next section). The second part is focused on teachers' view on education. It was created mainly by experienced teachers of the Geomatics section of the University of West Bohemia. To find out the students view on the education question, the experience from Multimedia Geomatics project was used. In this project, the students were subjected to the survey about the educational materials. The results of this project were presented on the Joint ICA Symposium in Oreleans, France [2]. The questionnaires were chosen as the method of the survey. The students were asked using input and output questionnaires with the time delay half a year. In the sum of both surveys, there were 64 responses collected form 91 addressed students. The input and output questionnaires contained similar questions to compare the changes of the students requirements. The questionnaires were organised into the four parts described below. In the first part, the statistical data were collected. The information like study field or the number of terms with geomatics lessons helps to better results interpretation and to find the interesting dependencies (see Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Evaluating of learning materials in dependence of study length The second part concerned with evaluation of learning materials. Students were asked to individually rank all materials to geomatics subjects and to make overall evaluation. In the Fig. 1, the overall ranking is shown depending on the students number of terms with geomatics lessons. The aim of the third part of questionnaires was to find out what kind of materials is most useful for students. The several types of study materials were ranked by students using scale from 1 (the worse)

3 to 10 (the best). As shown on Fig. 2, the printed text was chosen like the most appropriate material by the students. The lowest rank of video and audio materials may be caused by insufficient number of this kind of materials and thus the low experience level with them. Fig. 2. Students ranking of multimedia materials In the last section, the students had a space to express their opinions and comments. The four main points resulted from this section. The students need to have the learning materials: available before the lecture suitable to print accessible online at one place (central storage) supplemented with audio records of lectures The students feedback was valuable for lecturers. In the conclusion of projects, the lecturers got chance to modify their materials to fit the students needs. Contrariwise the students requirements whose are mostly focused on maximum accessibility of study materials, there are also teachers requirements, whose are focused on student s ability to study. Teachers requirements can be basically divided into three levels: Necessary requirements: Students are able to keep their knowledge from grammar and high school, at least grammatically correct verbal and written expression (at least in native language) and adequate level of mathematical and logical skills. Even if those requirements can be understand as the minimum level, unfortunately there can be found university students whose have problems which such a level. But these students have to be treated as exceptions. The majority of students usually reach a fundamental level of teachers requirements. These students are able to: be active during lessons read and understand scientific text in English However, a significant part of current university students has problems with other reqiurements whose fits into this level, particularly to: clearly formulate their ideas study individually be prepared to individual consultations (extremely important for distance students)

4 Optimum teacher requirements fulfil students, who are able to: do active research follow standard scientific methodology: hypotheses setting hypotheses verification formulating discussion and conclusions Even if each university would like to have more individual students, whose fulfil the optimum level of teacher requirements, according to Gauss curve, the majority of students fulfil the medium level of teacher requirements ant for those students it is extremely helpful to provide various study materials. In general it is possible to say that students support training activities while teachers prefer the education as the interconnection of theory and training. Just the explanation of the importance of theory and complex education represents the one of role of universities. This activity is strongly interconnected to the motivation of students, communication and application of new methodologies, knowledge and technologies. 3. Projects The section Projects shows some cases of implementation of rules and requirements mentioned in previous part of this article. The list is not complete, because the CCSS and UWB cooperate in many projects and the education activities were, are and will be their important components. We participated (together with Czech company Help service remote sensing) on training and education in projects like Humboldt, Habitats or Plan4all. The following paragraphs introduce the another projects that were or are focused on education primarily. The field of geomatics is very reactive as it is under the influance of information technologies. There are also other circumstances like the political ones which affect the educational process. That is the reason why the vocational education is nowadays so important. The SDI-EDU project (full name SDI- EDU for reginal and urban planning; for two years aimed to support the vocational education using the modern educational platform. The main target groups were spatial planners, architects and geoinformation specialists. These people are very busy by their professional work and therefore the educational platform must enable them to access the content whenever they have a time to study. They must also face the new trends which influence their daily work. The particular example could be the European directive INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Data in Europe) which brings many demands on daily work of the SDI-EDU project s target groups. The educational curriculum which was developed within the framework of the SDI-EDU project reflects this directive and puts the emphasis on the use cases and best practices which were transfered from other related research projects like Plan4all ( or Humboldt ( The mutual cooperation among experts from the universities, technicians and people with real practise in spatial planning enabled to create such curriculum and platform which meets the needs of real users and follows the trends of the modern vocational education. The core part of the final educational platform is the BizBiz video-conferencing tool ( and geoportal [3].This combination allows users (students) to explore the educational content everytime they have PC connected to the internet and modern browser. Students can attend the online lessons lead by live lecturer or to open the already recorded lesson. The platform gives an opportunity to find out the particular lesson using metadata. The professional vocational education as introduced in the SDI-EDU project was evaluated by its real target users as very useful. It enables systematic training which helps to spatial planners

5 and other specialists to stay in touch with any changes in political, legal and technological environment. Metaschool - Towards Teacher Competence on Metadata and Online Resources ( was a two-years collaborative European project funded by the Comenius programme and focused on improving the in-service training of school teachers and school ICT staff on topics related to the organisation, sharing, use and re-use of digital learning resources that can be accessed online through learning repositories across Europe. In general, the project aimed to improve teachers practice in all areas of their work, combining ICT skills with innovations in pedagogy, curriculum, and school organization. It is also aimed at teachers use of ICT skills and resources to improve their teaching, to collaborate with colleagues, and perhaps ultimately to become innovation leaders in their institutions. The main output of the Metaschool project was an innovative training programme on the methodological approaches on how teachers can integrate digital content available on the web with core academic content in lesson plans and increase student participation in classroom activities. In addition a portal was also developed which acts as the main hub of all the training resources and training scenarios. The portal now serves as distributor of information giving access to large databases of educational content, organizer of suitable didactic activities. The aims of the Metaschool approach were: to offer technology-supported learning opportunities, to introduce and integrate learning resources for classroom use, to introduce learning repositories to teachers, to motivate teachers to inform the remaining teachers in their schools about using repositories, content, metadata, to make quality educational content more attractive to both teachers and students The pedagogical approach of the Metaschool training modules enables teachers to achieve the levels of technical and pedagogical competence required to make eff ective use of the resources available. Mulitimedia Geomatics ( only in Czech) was the national project realized in the Geomatics section ( of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. In the year 2011 the huge number of multimedia stuff supporting the various of courses of Geomatics study programme such as surveying, computer and mathematical cartography, photogrammetry, GIS analyses or spatial databases. Student can work with hypertext (as the simplest variant of mulitimedia materials), audio and video files, tutorials, web applications (e.g. timeline in dipity / or interactive self-tests. The development of studying materials was based on students' and lecturers' requirements (see above) as well as on pedagogical methodologies (the evaluation of materials by the expert on pedagogy was the part of project). In the terms of projects the mobile solution was introduced to the geomatics education. It is connected to the one requirement to support the modern technologies to stay in touch with ongoing trends. These technologies are very attractive for students even for some teachers and lecturers. The CentraLab ( project represents another activity oriented partially to geomatics and geoinformatics education. The main target of the CentraLab is to interconnect Living Labs (research concept based on a systematic user co-creation approach integrating research and innovation processes) in the Central Europe. The interconnection is based on the realization of pilots. The pilot Education and environemt leaded by Czech Center for Science and Society is focused on education activities. The aim of this pilot is to create a catalogue based on metadata standards. The catalogue will offer information about learning and educational material (including free spatial data sets, recommended GIT application etc.) developed in various projects and institutes and provided free of charge. The unique approach will not only connect partners in Czech Republic, Slovakia,

6 Hungary and other countries in the Central Europe but even enable to re-use existing materials and spare financial and time resources. 4. Conclusion Geoinformatics and geomatics are rapidly changing disciplines. These changes are impacting the needs for a highly trained and capable workforce. Education is attempting to adapt and to provide a solution to these demanding and changing circumstances. The paper Teachers' and Students' Requirements on Geomatics and Geoinformatics Education introduces and summarizes the educational requirements and activities on the field of geomatics and geoinformatics. The fundamental principle of education comprises mostly existing experience, skills, education, knowledge, information, competencies, educational materials (including data, maps and metadata) and in some subjects also talent. Students and teachers need to transform these inputs to new information, knowledge and competencies. This transfer is realized through three main pillars - pedagogical and educational principles, people and technologies. The most important approach emphasized by students as well as lecturers the communication is. It should be based not only on direct contact, but also the modern technologies such as social media, web technologies or multimedia should be applied. But it is necessary to find a consensus in the case of communication too. Because the students prefers clear and simple transfer of information while teachers support searching information, their processing and analyzing. As was mentioned in the previous section on of the new roles of universities should be promoting the importance of education. This task have the same momentousness as the second role - universities as patenters and licensors (mentioned in [6]). Finally we would like to mention the information published by U.S. Department of Labor it has designated Geotechnology as one of the three mega-technologies of the 21st century right up there with Nanotechnology and Biotechnology [1]. Previous sentence also emphasizes the importance and key role of lifelong learning activities in geomatics and geoinformatics now as well as in the future. Reference [1] [1] Berry, J. K. A Brief History and Probable Future of Geotechnology. BASIS, Fort Collins, Colorado (USA), [2] [2] Cada, V., Fiala, R., Janecka, K., Jedlicka, K., Jezek, Vichrova, M. Teaching Geomatics with Web 2.0. In Joint ICA Symposium, Orleans (France), [3] [3] Janecka, K., Berzins, R., Charvat, K., Dzerve, A.: On how to build SDI using social networking principles in the scope of spatial planning and vocational education. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, ISBN: [4] [4] Liessmann, K. P.. Teorie nevzdělanosti. Omyly společnosti vědění. Academia, Praha, ISBN: [5] [5] Maret, P.. The Changing Role of Universities in our Societies. A European Perspective. China-Europa Forum, URL: [6] [6] Mowery, D. C. The Changing Role of Universities in the 21st Century U.S. R&D System. In AAAS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY YEARBOOK 2002, Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson, Stephen J. Lita (eds.), American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002 URL: