This month, the 20th annual intake of UNIGIS MSc students
have started their coursework towards this highly regarded professional
qualification in Geoinformatics and GIScience. In early 1994, the first committed group of
dedicated Masters students embarked on their journeys towards a postgraduate
degree in GIS at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Meeting for their first
residential workshop, the dedication of the 1994 cohort was very similar like
this year’s, but of course back then no reassuring role models were available
for these enterprising spirits.
Credit goes to the University of Salzburg for allowing such
a groundbreaking initiative to happen through establishing the original 1993 curriculum.
Degree programs via distance learning supporting in-service professionals were
considered a major breakthrough (or risk?) back then, shared with our partner
universities in Manchester and Amsterdam. Since then, this idea has spawned
partner programs worldwide, with numerous study centres in Asia and Africa
affiliated with UNIGIS Salzburg.
The degree of innovation and change over those 20 years of
course was staggering. The idea of doing class assignments with GIS software
installed on personal computers at home was pushing a few limitations, and
mailing learning materials obviously was the precursor to today’s online
Learning Management Systems. The ambition of developing one’s geospatial knowledge
and skills as a foundation for a career in a challenging field was just the
same like it is today, though.
In the meantime, more than 1500 students have graduated from
UNIGIS Salzburg alone, owing their success to their farsighted commitment to
hard work, a dedicated faculty and support from GIS industry facilitating
access to professional software for study purposes when campus and student licensing
were virtually unheard of in our discipline.
While many parts of the curriculum have evolved and now
include open geospatial standards, distributed architectures and mobile
sensors, competences in cartographic communication, spatial data models and
spatial analysis methods are key elements of the unique qualification shared by
what likely is the biggest alumni community in the geospatial world.
The University of Salzburg has since then established a full
suite of academic programmes with a bachelor level ‘minor’ plus a geospatial
element for teachers training, an international MSc in ‘Applied Geoinformatics’
and a highly regarded doctoral college for GIScience. Reaching out to many
academic institutions worldwide, the UNIGIS framework still serves as a
blueprint and curricular ‘gold standard’ for professional graduate
qualifications for geospatial experts.
Congratulations to all who have made it through the UNIGIS Salzburg programme – and we continue to welcome students dedicated to their
goals!
