LBS2ITS - Curricula Enrichment delivered through the Application of Location-based Services to Intelligent Transport

Engineering disciplines such as Cartography, Geomatics and Geodesy depend heavily on practical courses and “hands-on” education, both demand a strong “active” component of students and opportunities of systematic interaction loops between teachers and students. In this paper we discuss the enhancement of such classes through switching from a rather project-based learning focus on a problem-based learning mode. Experiences from several classes in this context, especially in the domain of Location-based Services, Cartography and Geomatics, are discussed and reasoning for further development of such a problem-based learning environment is given. The aim of “activating” students can be reached therefore.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, distance learning had to be increasingly implemented at universities, and more e-learning formats had to be applied. The LBS2ITS project carried out under the lead of the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation at TU Wien (TUW), Austria, came at the right time for these tasks. Education in Location-Based Services (LBS) is put to a new level including interactive e-learning and Problem-Based Learning (PBL) pedagogy. In the courses modernization, special attention is paid to the development and/or update of the courses to be implemented with these two pedagogic forms. Thus, teaching with an emphasis on learning outcomes is a central theme in the LBS2ITS project. To achieve this goal, the active verbs used in updated Bloom’s taxonomy for teaching on learning outcomes, i.e., remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, are applied to achieve the six levels of thinking and the active nature of learning. LBS2ITS will build a fully immersive and integrated LBS teaching and learning experience with the LBS application of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in mind. The outcome will be an innovative digital learning environment supporting synthetic and real-world PBL learning experiences. In the course of the project, a workshop for introduction of these new developments was held. This paper provides an insight into the results and experiences from this workshop. As e-learning and PBL must be combined and integrated nowadays, the new term PBeL (Problem-Based e-Learning) is proposed and introduced in this paper. The development of this approach and background information on the theory and the LBS2ITS project are presented.

In 2021, the three-year Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) project LBS2ITS, short for ‘Curricula Enrichment for Sri Lankan Universities Delivered Through the Application of Location-based Services to Intelligent Transport Systems’, started with the aim to introduce and/or update education at four partner universities in Sri Lanka in the LBS (Location-based Services) domain. The level of education in LBS in Sri Lanka is still in its infancy and cannot rapidly deliver the knowledge inputs required to change transport management decision-making in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Modern education methods, such as e-learning and Problem-based learning (PBL), must play a central role in the newly developed courses and course modules. Thereby, syllabi and course contents are developed on the lesson level. The outcome will be a digital learning environment supporting synthetic and real-world learning experiences which encourage self-paced learning modules with digital resource kits for interaction with modern equipment, continuous assessment and two-way feedback. Webinars and virtual experiences will underpin real-world PBL scenarios. In this paper, the results of a workshop on e-learning and PBL pedagogy are presented. Examples for PBL courses in geodesy, geoinformatics and transport engineering from the literature and the seven participating project partners underpin the feasibility of the introduction of these new education methods.