Enhancing post-graduate administration capacity
SuGIK’s first set of activities will aim to strengthen administrative and technical capacities of the African partner universities to effectively implement a distance Master’s programme in GIS&T. To this end, a management and administration model will be developed in cooperation with the European partner. Concretely, guidelines will be defined regarding the management and quality assurance, delivery and assessment of the future GIS&T postgraduate course. These activities will help support the transfer of expertise between the Portuguese partner and African staff.
For instance, a distance learning platform will be established at the African partner institutions. The role of this platform will be to support the traditional GIS&T postgraduate course contents delivery and lectures. Additionally, research planning cells necessary for the improvement of academic and teaching excellence will be set up at these two universities.
Adapting European curricula to African reality
The current postgraduate program in GIS&T offered by the Portuguese partner will be adapted to the needs and realities of the labour market in Mozambique and Cape Verde. Subsequently, curricula contents, educational approaches and GIS software and technologies will be thought to local GI teachers in Cape Verde and Mozambique.
During the project’s first year, the African partner institutions will conduct a regional and local study on the necessities of professionals in different activities in the areas of geographic information. This will help identify the specific competencies that the GIS&T postgraduate course should promote and ensure an efficient reformulation of the contents that must be proposed for the second and third editions of the course. This process will ensure a complete revision of the original European Master’s programme according to the regional/national needs in the area of geographic information science and technology.
Delivering a self-sustainable Master’s programme
The postgraduate course will be organised into two semester modules distributed through five learning areas. During the first year, the course will be taught by Portuguese professors to a group of selected students from both African partner institutions. In the second year this course will be given by Portuguese teachers in a partnership with selected students from the first edition of the course.
Lastly, in the third year of the project, all teaching activities will be carried out by the best students of the first and second editions of the course. This will allow for a successful handover of responsibilities from the European to the African partners. It will lead to the ownership by the African professors of the teaching techniques and a capacity to run the programme without the help of the European partner.
Finally, the project partners will establish a long lasting and effective regional and national partnership network, promoting good practice, providing skills transfer opportunities, and encouraging economic development and cooperation through the use of Geographic Information Science teaching and learning for the sustainable development.
