Geomatics at the Crossroads: Time for a New Paradigm in Geomatics Education?

摘要

While surveying programs appear to be proliferating at two- and four-year colleges, graduate programs in Geomatics/Survcying have been undergoing major transformations that have de-linked undergraduate and graduate programs in our discipline. In this paper I review the reorganization o( Geomatics programs in five U.S. universities and identify a severe shortage of qualified individuals who will teach Surveying/Geomatics in the future. Until recently, the lack of effective marketing of our programs has weakened our education programs, causing supply to fall well behind demand. Opportunities to ride the wave of GIS and a shift toward spatial information brokering have been missed. I suggest that we are at a crucial crossroads in our discipline's evolution and need lo identify new paradigms as a basis for developing more resilient and responsive educational programs. Three promising areas are proposed as a means of promoting a debate within the Geomatics community.