MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT FOR ENVIRONMENT MONITORING – A NEW PROGRAMME OF MASTER STUDIES IN ENGLISH

Global trends show the focus on the protection and monitoring of the environment and sustainable economic development. This trend is especially supported by European countries aware of the huge role of technology in environmental protection. On the other hand, the rapid growth of IT is noticeable in more and more areas of human activity. Environment monitoring is one of areas which are subject to computerization. High quality IT systems are built to support gathering and analysing environmental data. However, there are also more and more concrete needs from the society related to environment protection and monitoring. Currently one can also observe a huge increase in the number of people interested in environmental protection. These trends are being accompanied by the changes in IT. The increasing number and quality of mobile devices and a wide access to mobile technologies changes the ICT market. Concurrently with the development of the mobile market there appeared a possibility to have access to low-cost sensors which might be successfully applied to monitor the quality of the environment. This gives a possibility to share mobile applications supporting environment monitoring and dedicated to the whole community. Such applications could be developed in the form of social networks where users share data about the environment and pollution. Developers of such mobile applications need to have skills to build mobile applications as well as having knowledge about environmental protection and monitoring aspects.

In order to respond to the market needs, the Lublin University of Technology has developed a new Master’s Programme in Computer Science. The programme is called “Mobile Application Development for Environment Monitoring” and it is developed fully in English to support internationalisation of education at the Lublin University of Technology. This Master’s studies programme was created with the support of EEA Grants and Norway Grants as a result of the project “Mobile Application Development for Environmental Monitoring – a New Program of Master Studies in English”.

This paper presents the teaching programme, formal requirements, the process of development of the new specialization as well as the examples of courses’ contents.