Applying a Problem Based Learning Approach to Land Management Education: The Case of Aalborg University, Denmark

Land management covers a wide range activities associated with the management of land and natural resources that are required to fulfil political objectives and achieve sustainable development. This paper presents an overall understanding of the land management paradigm and the benefits of good land governance to society. A land administration system provides a country with the infrastructure to implement land-related policies and land management strategies. By applying this land management profile to surveying education, this paper suggests that there is a need to move away from an exclusive engineering focus toward adopting an interdisciplinary and problem-based approach to ensure that academic programmes can cope with the wide range of land administration functions and challenges.

An interdisciplinary approach to surveying education calls for the need to address issues and problems in a real-world context. The combination of different disciplines can be taught through a “learning-by-doing approach”. Problem solving skills can be taught through a project-oriented approach to surveying education with a focus on developing skills for “learning to learn”. The basic principles of this educational model are presented using the surveying programme at Aalborg University as an example.

This paper is work in progress and draws from previous research. The paper supports the lecture on Problem Based Learning given at NUST 3 March 2016.