Innovations in geomatics teaching during the COVID-19 emergency

Abstract

The approach in the teaching process is changing, thanks to the increased awareness that a higher students’ involvement leads to a better quality of their learning. The aim is to make the students more participative, avoiding a unidirectional lesson and encouraging their wish to keep updated on the course advancements. However, innovative teaching methodologies are not yet widespread, mainly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. At the University of Genoa, the experimentation of innovative teaching techniques has been significant and worthy especially because it was planned before the COVID-19 emergency and applied in the scenario of forced remote teaching. Thanks to the introduction of novel technological instruments, several techniques have been exploited to realize interactive lessons and promoting students’ involvement. The present work discloses the employed techniques and frames them within the state of the art of innovative teaching, highlighting their contribution in the teaching activities related to the Geomatics field of knowledge. The acquired experiences in Geomatics dissemination and a critical analysis, including teachers’ and students’ perception about the tested innovative teaching/learning tools, are also reported. In general, the innovations introduced in teaching and learning processes during the COVID-19 sanitary emergency were warmly received by the entire community, including teachers, students, and teaching assistants.

Challenges and Opportunities for Education Systems with the Current Movement toward Digitalization at the Time of COVID-19

“…The application of different AI-based methods and digitalization plans have been considered for the automation of work processes and upholding of social distancing [2,30,32,40,48,106,107]. It will be necessary to focus on the application of AI methods for career planning and consulting with students and fostering their decisionmaking.…”

“…The departments can establish different short-term skillbased programs and long-term educational courses in novel fields such as digital psychology, motivational courses for remote employees, and digital management, to name a few [1,2,11,20,22,40,56,104,105]. In particular, in some fields such as medical education new competencies will be expected from the graduates [30,32,48,106,107].…”

“…Besides, various streams of education will become more available to students, and the same topic will be available to study through different channels, e.g., animation, virtual reality, video, online teaching, and in-person teaching. Therefore, the learner will have more freedom to follow their personal preference in their learning endeavor [31,32,106]. An example of a case where an AI-based solution is used for enabling personal preference can be found at Bolton College where IBM Watson is employed as a virtual assistant and helps delivering on-demand to requests by students for information, advice and guidance [35].…”

“…Although initial studies have shown it was the fear of losing their jobs that provoked employees to sustain the level of efficiency, and concerns of balancing their private life and work are still present, many firms have announced their intention of keeping employees at home even after the lessening of the coronavirus crisis [24,27]. Given this prospective work environment, universities should plan properly to prepare their students for the dominant scheme of telework, distant collaboration, and team working, besides their remote employee management schemes [2,4,18,23,26,51,76,93,106].…”

A Bibliometric Analysis: Remote Sensing Literature in Dimensions.ai Database

“…Remote sensing refers to the identification of planet earth by analyzing various physical events such as detecting electromagnetic radiation. The use of remote sensing is currently very widely used in various fields, including education (Botto et al, 2022;Li et al, 2020;Tiwari et al, 2021), industry (Hao et al, 2022), mining (Song et al, 2020), defense and security (Mehta et al, 2021), regional planning (Kumar et al, 2021), to the health sector (Ye, 2022).…”