Landslides in Higher Education Curricula and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract Education is a human right and plays a decisive role in capacity building from the pre-school level to professional, under-, and postgraduate university study programmes in higher education institutions and beyond, such as summer schools or as a part of lifelong education for a general audience. It gives us a profession or helps the general population and diverse stakeholders (e.g., policy and decision makers) increase society’s resilience against natural hazards, such as landslides. Thus, education finds a principal place also in numerous international documents accepted by the UN organizations. The article looks at education as a topic of international strategic documents on disaster risk reduction. It uses diverse web tools and databases to assess worldwide efforts in teaching/education on landslides and their disaster risk reduction at higher education levels and beyond. The focus is on the higher education study programmes offering courses on slope stability and landslide mitigation. This topic is widely covered by study programmes in the field of disaster risk management and classical study programmes in civil, geological, geotechnical engineering, as well as in geology and geography. The second cycle covers the landslide topic, i. e. master study programmes and university programmes are prevailing. There is an apparent lack of academic programmes offered as blended programmes or distance learning programmes in disaster risk reduction, including landslide risk. Certificates and diploma levels prevail among academic programmes offered as online courses or continuing education. The web search found a few (summer) schools dedicated to landslide topics and a variety of other open-access material that can be used for education and capacity building, such as blogs, databases, teaching tools, presentations, or video lectures. The International Consortium on Landslides might offer collected information in this article on its web pages under the topic “Educational tools” and then open it up to their members and landslide community to contribute to the content by sending links to elsewhere freely available educational material in landslide disaster risk reduction.