With digital revolution ongoing the need for fast modernization of technology driven geoinformatics related courses become necessity for academic institutions. But this is not an easy task. Changing syllabuses of study programs requires knowledge, time and money. Not rarely, all those three elements are lacking or short. This is especially visible in technology driven course like in field of geoinformatics including Remote sensing, GIS, new sensors and tools like GNSS, Laser, Lidar, Earth observation satellites and Drones, as well as sensor integration and application development.
Those technologies develop with such speed that high-school struggle to cope with changes and ultimate necessity to deliver – produce new professionals which have skills and knowledge requested by business sector. Therefore, we can conclude that the academic sector (globally) lags behind in the introduction of modern technologies with the consequence: the academic “product” does not have the knowledge and skills necessary for the business and public sectors – the contribution to the community is not maximal!
So, the question is how to address this problem and develop model which will in general be robust enough to enable high-school institutions to cope with those fast changes. It is hard to expect that high-school institutions can do it alone. Due to the mentioned lacking resources even often introduced reorganization can’t result with satisfactory results. Therefore, search for external resources should be undertaken. Under external resources we are identifying two stakeholder groups, businesses and public institutions. While in the geoinformatics domain public stakeholders are facing same problems as high-school institutions, the business sector is the one which is capable to recognize technologies which promise and react promptly.
However, even business sector is facing problem since it is scattered and requires support in developing new products and markets. Looking into advantages and disadvantages which characterize Business and Academia sectors we can see that they are complementary and can provide lot of support to each other. And this cognition is nothing new, it is known fact. But in practice in many countries, it does not work well due to many concrete and imaginary obstacles.
Being aware of this fact in frame of Erasmus+ Key action 2 – Capacity Building in Higher Education project “Business driven problem-based learning for academic excellence in geoinformatics” – GEOBIZ project consortia gave itself a task to develop new model of Business-Academia cooperation. With ultimate goal of efficient modernization of technology driven courses in field of geoinformatics and related disciplines project goal is to involve businesses in the educational process in several ways. Courses should be based on business cases from companies, which should be addressed in problem-based learning approach and should include companies in teaching process, especially its practical part.
The model developed and results achieved are not only meant for project partners but also for interested businesses and academic institutions. Therefore, we will use this Blog to share with you our model and achievements with practical examples how it works in our case. We hope it may help some of you to implement the Business-Academia cooperation based on our model or even develop better one.
Written by GEOBIZ project coordinator
