Surveyors’ Opportunities for Collaborative Surveying Erasmus Project

Project Title

Surveyors’ Opportunities for Collaborative Surveying

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

Surveyor’s Opportunities for Collaborative Surveying (acronym SOCS) is Strategic partnership initiative by four training organisations all providing qualification in Surveying. Three partners are VET-colleges: Helsinki Vocational College, FInland, Istituto di Istruzione Seconadaria Superiore “Buontalenti – Cappellini -Orlando”, Italy and Berufskolleg Cuno2, Germany. Fourth partner is Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Høgskulen på Vestlandet. The need for SOCS arose from the fact that participating colleges all agreed that internationalisation is on too low level within land surveying VET, e.g. students’ possibilities to do practical training periods abroad.
Partnership group focuses on strengthening and sharing of key competencies in Surveying and enhancing internationalisation of the sector, in participating colleges and especially among their students and teachers. The project is based on idea of collaborative learning for students in transnational groups during four one-week workshops each having separate surveying-theme as content. Themes have been built to resemble working life processes of surveying, gathering of data and applying the data into practices used in surveying sector. Thus, in first workshop week includes also gathering of data which in used used in 3D-modelling in second workshop, among other goals of the workshops. Similarly in third workshop data is gathered and later on processed in fourth workshop. Each workshop has also its own specific contents on top of continuum of data gathering and processing. These contents focus on methods of gathering and processing data, various equipment and software used for different purposes in surveying in different countries. Furthermore, health and safety norms, measures and risks of surveying are included in each workshop’s agenda as a generic topic, as these topics vary regarding to what line of work processes of surveying are dealt with in various themes. In order to enhance internationalisation and to improve preparations for surveying students’ KA1-type of longer mobility periods/practical training periods abroad, participating students will build up 5-language surveying glossary (EN-FI-DE-IT-NO) of key concepts.
During the four workshop weeks taking place in the project, each college will have 15 students participating in the project as each college will have 5 students per workshop week. Therefore students hosting their national workshop week will have to have the possibility to participate in one workshop abroad, and therefore total number of students per college sums up to 15. In all, during the process 60 surveying students will have possibility to participate in workshops. Number of teachers is more limited, as apart for HVL/NO all other partner college’s surveying departments are quite small and rotation of participating surveying teachers has to be decided within colleges. According to plan there will be one surveying teacher going abroad with group of five students.
Working process in workshops consists of theme-related pre-assignments that are processed in transnational smaller student groups and of practical training sessions both indoors (e.g. 3D-modelling of gathered data) and outdoors (e.g. gathering data with drones) and visits to surveying companies during the workshop weeks. Each workshop week is more or less a mixture of different learning methods, small transnational group work, discussions, comparisons, building up summaries and presentations, active hands-on-surveying work and company visits. All summaries and results of pre-assignments are saved to act as supportive learning material when preparing surveying students for longer practical training periods abroad.
For participating teachers the project provides excellent possibilities to learn from other other colleges’ colleagues their pedagogic approaches and methods, get to know different types of equipment and software/applications and how these are used in teaching / learning processes of future surveyors. Participation also consolidates co-operation between colleges and enables them to share other external surveying college and company contacts with each other, once again promoting and facilitating surveying students’ practical training periods in another Member State.
According to discussions taken place between partners, project facilitates boosting surveying students’ internationalisation, especially when sharing the experiences and practices between colleges, sending and receiving surveying students becomes more appealing for all parties.
Partners are also anxious to share their experiences with other, mainly national level VET-providers and with their EU-level already existing surveying colleges via dissemination of the results. Aim in the long run is to enhance and facilitate surveying sector’s internationalisation in VET, and by sharing the experiences and recruiting more surveying VET-providers to the SOCS-network.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 84084 Eur

Project Coordinator

Helsingin kaupunki & Country: FI

Project Partners

• Istituto di Istruzione Secondaria Superiore “Buontalenti – Cappellini – Orlando”
• Cuno-Berufskolleg II
• HOGSKULEN PA VESTLANDET