Degree programme initiative: Capactiy building across individual courses

When revising the BSc curriculum in Geomatics and Planning, we had a set of goals apparently contradicting in view of the fixed amount of credit points for the entire program: We wanted to convey a solid domain specific basis in geospatial engineering ranging from geodesy, measurement sciences and geoinformation to spatial planning, traffic, transport and infrastructure management. We wanted to modernize the education by emphasizing data science and machine learning even more than before. And we wanted to facilitate the strengthening of argumentation, writing and teamworking skills. We then decided not to include extra courses for these transferable skills but to enhance them throughout the program. This was the starting point and main motivation for the initiative.

We started by identifying eight concrete competence areas which we found important for the professional career but also for successfully studying. Then we built upon opportunities already there within the program. For instance, in many courses the students needed to present, write or visualize. And they also got feedback. We worked on making the development of the skills more transparent by planning and communicating it to students and lecturers. In order to enable the implementation, we have compiled supporting documents. We published the learning objectives, the supporting documents as well as graphics showing the implementation across the curriculum on the degree program web page.

A central element of our approach was stakeholder participation and networking throughout the development and implementation phases of the project. Apart from dedicated workshops we achieved that by initiating informal brown bag meetings for all lecturers. We used these events to stimulate the exchange of experiences among the lecturers, to get early feedback on ideas, to further develop them, and to disseminate the results of the initiative. It turned out that in particular external lecturers, fairly new lecturers and lecturers from other departments providing service courses appreciated these meetings as an opportunity for low-threshold networking within the program.

Looking at the successful start of the revised degree program with increasing numbers of incoming students, at the interest of the lecturers in the brown bag meetings and at sporadic personal feedback regarding the supporting documents, we think that the initiative was successful. However, there has not yet been a formal survey to measure the success. This was mainly delayer because of other priorities during the semesters impaired by Covid-19.

A key challenge was to win enough lecturers willing and capable of supporting this initiative actively. This worked out well in our case. Likely because of stakeholder participation throughout the initiative, and maybe also because of the documents which we provided to the students and lecturers and which were designed such as to support without creating additional burden. These documents are now available without access restrictions on the webpage of the degree program. They can and hopefully will be used outside the area of Geospatial Engineering. In fact, we tried to develop them such that they would also be useful for students and lecturers from other programs.

• Learning and Teaching Fair 2020