The degree programme initiative in Geospatial Engineering
Graduates from a university need a broad range of competencies for a successful professional career. This includes social, personal and general methodical competencies beyond the domain specific ones. Most courses in a university program focus on the formation of the latter because this is where the lecturers, many of them highly distinguished scientists, can put in their core expertise best. Students thus need to increase their awareness and level of transferable skills proactively by themselves e.g., through role models. This is inevitable. Or is it perhaps not?
Documents
One of the main outcomes of the initiative is a set of documents containing tips and tricks as well as concise summaries of concepts and further reading for enhancing skills in argumentation, critical thinking, technical/scientific writing, visualization, presentation, learning management, teamwork, and project management.
These documents are not custom tailored to the program in Geospatial Engineering but are fairly general. They are organized hierarchically with a short introduction – about 2 pages – for each of the eight competences. Ideally, all students and lecturers read these introductions for an overview. From there on, they can individually choose which of the additional documents they use, and when. Those comprise more detailed handouts referring to certain aspects of the competences, e.g. argumentation structures, the writing process, or team roles to mention just a few. Additionally, there are check lists, templates, and for some topics further explanatory documents.
The lecturers are encouraged to refer to these materials or even use them in class. The students are encouraged to use them also proactively on their own. In connection with learning outcomes, published on the degree program web page, the documents are also meant as a reference for transparently indicating the transferable skills acquired by the students.
Timeline
Timeline of the the initiative.
- Question:
- What was this degree program initiative about?
- Answer:
- When revising our Bachelor’s curriculum, 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 main goal of the initiative
- Question:
- Don’t the students develop these skills automatically during their studies?
- Answer:
- When the students come to ETH they already have strongly developed transferable skills from their prior education. But the proficiency differs a lot between students, and their particular attention is required by the domain specific challenges they are confronted with. Furthermore, the lecturers are not necessarily good role models in terms of all required transferable skills. So, it is hard for the students to “automatically” acquire the right skills at the right time. And even if they do, they may not be aware of these skills. So, when they later apply for a job they do not emphasize capabilities which are important for their future employers and may be decisive factors for hiring decisions.
- Question:
- And you decided to change this without putting in extra courses?
- Answer:
- Yes, indeed. The main ideas were to plan and communicate which transferable skills the students should have acquired at which stage during the program.
- Question:
- So, the students still would have to develop these skills by themselves beside the courses?
- Answer:
- No, or at least not only. We wanted to give them the opportunity to further develop the skills within the courses. Hoping, naturally, that they would find the skills useful and work on them beyond the courses.
- Question:
- This sounds difficult. How do you assure that the students get the right opportunities?
- Answer:
- The opportunities are there already. For instance, in many courses the students need to present, write or visualize. And they also get feedback. However, our approach was to make the development of the skills more transparent in the sense of planning it and communicating it to both students and lecturers. In order to enable the implementation, we have also worked out and provided supporting documents.
- Question:
- Can you be a bit more concrete? For instance, which skills do you enhance?
- Answer:
- We have explicitly formulated learning objectives for argumentation, critical thinking, technical/scientific writing, visualization, presentation, learning management, teamwork, and project management. We have chosen those not only because they are important skills for the professional career but also because they are important already for successfully studying. So, enhancing those skills early in the Bachelor’s program should make it easier for the students and also for the lecturers
- Question:
- You said you planned and communicated the development of the skills…
- Answer:
- Exactly. The planning was the development of the learning objectives, the definition of a sequence in terms of years within the program, and finally the association with individual domain specific courses. The communication…
- Question:
- Wait a moment. How do you assure that the lecturers are capable and willing to add your learning objectives to their courses?
- Answer:
- We tried to make it “their” objectives as well, not just “ours”. In reality we did not start by writing something up within the project team and then confronting the lecturers with it. Instead, we started off with structured, bilateral interviews with all lecturers who were willing to meet us for this purpose – these were almost all lecturers responsible for courses in our Bachelor’s program. We used these interviews to inform the lecturers about the initiative, find out which skills they found useful or necessary within their own courses, what their expectations regarding student’s skills were, and whether they had any material or experiences fostering those skills. During this phase we also got a feeling about which of the lecturers could be engaged and for which competencies. Later, we had workshops for discussing and finalizing the objectives to which all lecturers were invited. And once we had worked out supporting materials, we carried out another round of bilateral meetings to agree with the lecturers which learning objectives regarding transferable skills they would include in which of their courses. These agreements were documented using a visualization tool which displays which transferable skills are enhanced in which course to which degree.
- Question:
- How did you communicate all this to the students and lecturers?
- Answer:
- We published the learning objectives and the supporting material as well as graphics showing the implementation across the curriculum on the degree program web page accessible for all students and lecturers. Additionally, we initiated brown bag meetings for the lecturers to meet about three times per semester during a lunch break. We use these events to stimulate the exchange of experiences among the lecturers, and to disseminate the ideas and results of the initiative. These meetings are a bit like the Refresh Teaching events of ETH but on a smaller scale and even more informal. It turned out that in particular external lecturers, fairly new lecturers and lecturers from other departments providing service courses appreciate these meetings as an opportunity for low-threshold networking within the program.
- Question:
- Was the initiative successful?
- Answer:
- 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 yes, the initiative was successful. However, we have not yet carried out a survey to measure the success. This is planned for the later during the fall semester 2020.
- Question:
- Is there any take-home message you would like to end with?
- Answer:
- There are two. First, we are convinced that it is possible to enhance the development of transferable skills by the students through a transfer within the existing, domain specific courses. A key challenge is of course to win enough lecturers willing and capable of supporting this actively. This worked out well in our case. Likely because of stakeholder participation throughout the initiative, and secondly also because we provided documents which support the students and lecturers. And second, 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 hope that they will also be useful for students and lecturers from other programs.
