Abstract:

With the rapid development of Information Technology (IT) more and more areas of human activity is subject to computerization. IT professionals build increasingly complex IT systems for their clients. Acquiring requirements is a key factor of success in IT projects. IT specialists should know, understand and define the user requirements. However, complete user requirements might be hard to obtain due to a knowledge gap between IT specialists and their business partners, who are well experienced domain experts. Nevertheless, usually domain expert cannot be considered as IT specialists. Unfortunately, IT and non-IT specialists use different languages and have knowledge in different areas. The descriptions of the same system viewed from two sides differ significantly. It is therefore a natural gap between the understandings of the same problem by different specialists. Typical example of this kind of area is environmental protection and monitoring.
EU pays much attention to protection of human life environment and sustainable economic development. One of the protection elements is the environment monitoring. The rapid development of mobile technology enables the creation of large wireless sensor networks dedicated to environmental monitoring and multi-hazard early warning systems. Monitoring systems are usually distributed systems, which more and more often use mobile technologies. Environment monitoring systems construction is a complex technical project including data gathering, transmitting, storing and processing. For this purpose, IT mobile systems developers who also have a basic knowledge of environmental engineering are indispensable. Labour market research shows that there is a lack of specialists able to create mobile applications having qualifications in the environment monitoring area. This means the need for professionally train specialists. To solve the problem of their education a new Master programme called "Mobile Application Development for Environmental Monitoring" (MADEM) was prepared.
MADEM Master Programme was developed by Lublin University of Technology as a result of the project “Mobile Application Development for Environmental Monitoring - a New Program of Master Studies in English”. The project was supported by the EEA Grants and Norway Grants. This paper presents tasks, activities and results of the project MADEM. The detailed teaching programme and expected competencies of graduates are also presented.

Keywords:

Master programme, mobile application development, environmental monitoring.