THE NEW GIS COURSE
AT THE NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY
J. BADEKAS
ABSTRACT
In 1987 the Department of Topographical Engineering of the National
Technical University of Athens completed an innovation concerning the
academic curriculum. Many courses were withdrown, new ones were introduced
and the contents of others were drammatically changed.
One of the newly introduced courses, which was taught for the first time
in Spring 1990 was the course on Land Information Systems (LIS). Many things
related to this course are still open for discussion as we consider this being
quite far from finalized.
Although there is plenty of biliography, it is obviously very difficult to
formulate the course contents for a given university and given market. We have
spent quite long time discussing and trying to clarify our objectives in order to
finalize the contents.
The basic adoption was that LIS is the new form of maps and diagrams
and since our graduates besides being engineers, are actually mapmakers thus LIS
must be central to their education.
It was very difficult to allocate one man to teach the diverse and so
specialized filelds of this course and teaching was performed by a group. We
have also found many difficulties in formulating laboratory excersises and having
proper text books. For the time being everyone of the group has to prepare his
own lecture notes. Maybe some very interesting and very useful objectives for
the working groups of commission VI would be to assume or to support the
following:
a) the formulation of a model curriculum for a course on LIS or GIS
b) to collect*a set of slides or computer cassetes to be used for teaching LIS
or GIS
c) To collect and dessiminates laboratory exersizes for that purpose
d) publish extended revues of the existing related bibliography
e) to encourage or even to assume the writing and the publication of a
Mannual of LIS or GIS
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