Abstract:

“INTERNATIONAL Msc EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND MODELLING” (GeoNetC) is a European Commission funded project under ERASMUS+: Higher Education – International Capacity Building programme (Project No 561967-EPP-1-2015-1-SE-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). It began in October 2015 and will run until October 2018. Initiated by the Lund University and partners from the Middle East countries, the GeoNetC project is an ambitious project aiming to match labour market needs with geospatial education offer both in Europe and Middle East countries.

The aim of this three-year project is to enable European universities to exchange best practices and innovation with each other and with Middle Eastern universities regarding the mismatch between Europe’s geospatial education and training and the geospatial education in Middle East countries. There is a growing need for well-trained students at all levels – vocational, bachelors, masters – in the field of geospatial technologies. Obviously there is a growing number of jobs available in land surveying, mapping data collection, data processing, data delivery and turning data into information.

Through cooperation, all partners will improve the quality of their respective academic programs. The European partners will make their courses more attractive and well adjusted for students from the Middle East. As well, they will increase the general quality and add state-of-the-art learning components to their offerings, and the partners from the region will significantly increase the academic rigour and quality in the education they provide. There will be spin-offs into other subjects than environment/Geomatics, since both the pedagogic models developed (e.g. e-Learning) and communication and administrative tools can be used throughout the partner universities. Therefore, this partnership cooperation will be of great value to Partner Countries as well as to Programme Countries.

A number of distance learning courses/modules will be developed jointly by partner institutions in Europe and the Middle East. The main aim of the network is to promote the use of spatial information and earth observation for environmental management and modelling through capacity building and institutional development, via a network in which all partners would contribute from their own positions of strength.

All 13 modules to be developed will follow EU higher education standards regarding e.g. ECTS, and learning outcomes. The outcome of the project, in terms of courses/modules, will be freely used among the partners, with the possibilities of offering individual courses or a whole MSc programme, whether individually or together.

At the end of the project, all produced material will be evaluated/quality controlled by an external evaluation group. This will consist of independent experts within environmental management and modelling, higher education, as well as pedagogy.

Keywords:

Higher education, geospatial education, geoinformation system, well-trained student, distance learning system.