MULTI-LEVEL EDUCATION AND CAPACITY BUILDING FRAMEWORK FOR TECHNOLOGY ADAPTATION

Abstract. Advancements in the Geospatial Technology has brought about benefits to various fields in science and technology. The education and the capacity building of geospatial technology plays a very important role within these fields. The current practice of the education is basically dominated by the teacher, huge syllabus, non-relevant knowledge and having very little opportunity for the discussions between the students and teachers. Instead of the unidirectional, monolithic, rigid and traditional teaching in practice, it requires a change to dynamic, evolving, in-process and gradual system of learning to shape the knowledge society. This generates creative, innovative human beings to train them to perform based on the scientific reasoning and empirical evidence in their respective fields. In order to develop, there are three important components: content, practice and cross-cutting to be established as a strategy in the data savvy environment. The ‘content’ may shift to more emphasis on higher order skills of constructing explanations, the ‘practice’ would enhance critical thinking as well as synthesis and ‘cross-cutting’ would synergize the performance expectations. Hence, the modified education and capacity building programmes advocate to move to a competency based model and the imperatives motivate the better use of the technology. This paper explains multiple levels that exists across academic, research and practitioner community that have potential to benefit from geospatial technology and it determines appropriate curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation strategies. It also maps an appropriate framework and approaches for multi-level education and capacity building considering the recent developments in geospatial technology.