Challenges in Teaching Geoenvironmental Engineering Course: Fid-Bau Portal

Challenges in Teaching Geoenvironmental Engineering Course

Ribeiro, Luis F. M. / Chetri, Jyoti K. / Reddy, Krishna R.

Geoenvironmental engineering is a multidisciplinary field which focuses on providing engineering solutions to the environmental problems such as subsurface contamination. It requires knowledge of multiple disciplines such as geotechnical engineering, chemistry, biology, and environmental engineering. The growing events of environmental pollution have resulted in rapid advancements in the field of geoenvironmental engineering. Many advanced subsurface containment and remediation technologies have been developed. However, academic progression of geoenvironmental engineering is not in line with the professional advancement. Geoenvironmental engineering is not taught as a formal course in many academic institutions across the world. There are many challenges faced by the academic institutions to introduce and teach geoenvironmental engineering as a formal course. There is a need to devise strategies and methodologies to teach geoenvironmental engineering course in academic institutions. In this study, several challenges in teaching geoenvironmental engineering course were identified and ranked based on a survey. The survey was distributed among the professionals and academics working in the field of geoenvironmental engineering. Two main categories of challenges were identified: implementation challenges and acceptance challenges. Five challenges under each category were shortlisted and were ranked on a scale of 1–5, 1 being the least important and 5 being the most important, in the survey. The collected data were analyzed in terms of the rankings assigned by the group of respondents via the multi-criteria decision technique TOPSIS, which allowed ranking the challenges. Top three challenges in each category were selected as the basis for devising strategies and methodologies for introducing and teaching geoenvironmental engineering course. Not having expertise to teach geoenvironmental engineering was found to be the most critical challenge which needs to be addressed for successful implementation of geoenvironmental engineering course in academic institutions.