Online Surveying Engineering Education Initiatives

University civil engineering departments have historically been the home of surveying education in the United States. This close academic association of complementary professional occupations has served engineers and surveyors well for many years. However, as is so characteristic of today’s constant developments in most areas of science and engineering, the core knowledge and work strategies of civil engineering and surveying are evolving rapidly. To do justice to cutting-edge innovations, civil engineering departments should consider augmenting their curricula with courses covering state of the art surveying technologies.

For many civil engineering projects, application of these emerging surveying methodologies is vital. The best-known example is the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). The American global positioning system—GPS, as it is well known—was its initial component (circa late 1980s). Modern investigations have proven that GPS is not only useful in traditional applications such as high-accuracy deformation monitoring and vertical referencing, but also in transportation, timing and many other scientific and social activities that have a wide range of georeferencing needs whether in postprocessing or real-time modes. Other digital data transfer techniques such as terrestrial scanners, airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging), and terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry serve a multitude of civil engineering endeavors (i.e., raw data observations as they relate to working drawing).

Unfortunately, in-depth educational opportunities in these new technologies are very limited in the United States. Often, isolated “emergency solutions” exists in that only one of these scientific subjects is addressed in a specific curriculum, primarily because of a lack of faculty expertise.

Perhaps one way to complement this shortage of specialized education and the scarcity of trained scientists to meet the scholastic demands of the standard face-to-face classroom environment is via the implementation of the relatively new paradigm of cyberlearning (the application of network computing and communications to support learning). The recent advancements in information technologies and the swift progress in the computational and Internet disciplines have drastically changed the traditional conception that students and teachers need to share a common setting. Although student synergy is an important asset to social development, greater emphasis on interactive online courses may foster e-science access to a larger audience. For example, a civil engineering major specializing in structural deformation may want to take a formal course in terrestrial laser scanning or GPS. Therefore, the advantage of offering the possibility of a specialized online education venue dedicated to current technological subjects—at any time, any place—should be considered. I remind readers that I am referring specifically to comprehensive university courses, supported by virtual labs and compulsory competitive examinations embodying a degree path, and not merely to Webinars, or on-demand online seminars, which appear to proliferate. This online academically structured format is an increasing trend widely used by many prestigious universities. However, the vision of forming a pool of institutions of higher education—à la Pac10, Ivy League, etc.—where students can sign up for specialized interuniversity cybercourses to be added to their own particular degree curriculum—has not yet, to my knowledge, been established or even postulated.

In the last few years, the field of civil engineering in general, and surveying engineering in particular, has been compartmentalized into narrowly defined disciplines that deserve complete understanding before accurate computational and management decisions are made and implemented. This irrefutable fact brings tremendous potential to a variety of online academic domains within the surveying engineering degree.

In the present issue of the Journal the “Practitioner’s Forum” section is reopened to divulge what American universities are doing to enable creative procedures and/or ideas for enhancing the education of future surveying engineers. In this particular occasion, the contribution from Michigan Technology University [presently a four-year B.S. surveying engineering technology program with ABET (ASAC) accreditation and currently pursuing a more stringent ABET (EAC) accreditation] describes how the Internet could be fully exploited to impart advanced technical courses through this extraordinary medium, although the formal instruction may originate from places as far away as Russia and Israel. The article is self explanatory and sufficiently easy to comprehend. Its final goal is to emphasize the premise that high-quality surveying engineering instruction has no intellectual boundaries.