Surveyor's Opportunities for Collaborative Surveying (acronym SOCS) is Strategic partnership initiative by four training organisations all providing qualification in Surveying. Three partners are VET-colleges: Helsinki Vocational College, FInland, Istituto di Istruzione Seconadaria Superiore "Buontalenti - Cappellini -Orlando", Italy and Berufskolleg Cuno2, Germany. Fourth partner is Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Høgskulen på Vestlandet. The need for SOCS arose from the fact that participating colleges all agreed that internationalisation is on too low level within land surveying VET, e.g. students' possibilities to do practical training periods abroad. Partnership group focuses on strengthening and sharing of key competencies in Surveying and enhancing internationalisation of the sector, in participating colleges and especially among their students and teachers. The project is based on idea of collaborative learning for students in transnational groups during four one-week workshops each having separate surveying-theme as content. Themes have been built to resemble working life processes of surveying, gathering of data and applying the data into practices used in surveying sector. Thus, in first workshop week includes also gathering of data which in used used in 3D-modelling in second workshop, among other goals of the workshops. Similarly in third workshop data is gathered and later on processed in fourth workshop. Each workshop has also its own specific contents on top of continuum of data gathering and processing. These contents focus on methods of gathering and processing data, various equipment and software used for different purposes in surveying in different countries. Furthermore, health and safety norms, measures and risks of surveying are included in each workshop's agenda as a generic topic, as these topics vary regarding to what line of work processes of surveying are dealt with in various themes. In order to enhance internationalisation and to improve preparations for surveying students' KA1-type of longer mobility periods/practical training periods abroad, participating students will build up 5-language surveying glossary (EN-FI-DE-IT-NO) of key concepts. During the four workshop weeks taking place in the project, each college will have 15 students participating in the project as each college will have 5 students per workshop week. Therefore students hosting their national workshop week will have to have the possibility to participate in one workshop abroad, and therefore total number of students per college sums up to 15. In all, during the process 60 surveying students will have possibility to participate in workshops. Number of teachers is more limited, as apart for HVL/NO all other partner college's surveying departments are quite small and rotation of participating surveying teachers has to be decided within colleges. According to plan there will be one surveying teacher going abroad with group of five students. Working process in workshops consists of theme-related pre-assignments that are processed in transnational smaller student groups and of practical training sessions both indoors (e.g. 3D-modelling of gathered data) and outdoors (e.g. gathering data with drones) and visits to surveying companies during the workshop weeks. Each workshop week is more or less a mixture of different learning methods, small transnational group work, discussions, comparisons, building up summaries and presentations, active hands-on-surveying work and company visits. All summaries and results of pre-assignments are saved to act as supportive learning material when preparing surveying students for longer practical training periods abroad. For participating teachers the project provides excellent possibilities to learn from other other colleges' colleagues their pedagogic approaches and methods, get to know different types of equipment and software/applications and how these are used in teaching / learning processes of future surveyors. Participation also consolidates co-operation between colleges and enables them to share other external surveying college and company contacts with each other, once again promoting and facilitating surveying students' practical training periods in another Member State. According to discussions taken place between partners, project facilitates boosting surveying students' internationalisation, especially when sharing the experiences and practices between colleges, sending and receiving surveying students becomes more appealing for all parties. Partners are also anxious to share their experiences with other, mainly national level VET-providers and with their EU-level already existing surveying colleges via dissemination of the results. Aim in the long run is to enhance and facilitate surveying sector's internationalisation in VET, and by sharing the experiences and recruiting more surveying VET-providers to the SOCS-network.
To facilitate collaborative learning process, possibility for surveying students to compare in practice their competences, learn from each other during workshop weeks, compare equipment and software used in different countries, to create an arena for students establishing personal surveying networks. SOCS project was to facilitate beneficiaries i.e. participating students possibilities to include international co-opearation and collaborative learning experiences during their VET-studies, thus enhancing their awareness of Erasmus+ as a channel for broader perspective to vocational education and boost positive attitude towards internationalisation and professional identity. This has been already proven true, within surveying students their enthusiasm has increased and spread to younger surveying students. Participated students were very enthusiastic about the project, its collaborative nature and good balance of different activities. Like one NO student who participated in 3/4 WSWs put it: SOCS was about the best thing in my qualification studies.
Partnership group aimed to facilitate possibilities for surveying students to work and learn together i.e. to participate in collaborative learning process in transnational setting during 4 workshop weeks of the project. Partners were also to build co-operation network for the future for surveying colleges so that students´ practical training periods abroad could be organised more easily. After dissemination of the project´s outcome – collaborative learning of surveying students – the concept is marketed to other surveying colleges to broaden the network. One aim was also to be able to comprehend and compare surveying qualifications between partner countries, compare required competences / learning outcomes and how training is delivered to students. Participating teachers naturally were to gain ideas for their own work as surveying teachers by working together in transnational setting - like students. To keep project manageable the SOCS-partners estimated that 5 students per college, 20 in all per WSW could be quite optimal, e.g. from arranging accommodation viewpoint and to have premises and equipment available for WSW group.