Mission Statement of the Education Committee

The IGS Education Committee is composed of IGS Council members and of invited IGS members from the academy and the geosynthetic industry and aims to promote and develop education on geosynthetics in all its forms and to help the promotion of the use of geosynthetics via educational means.

Charge of the Education Committee:
The Education Committee is concerned with all geosynthetics-related educational matters. Some of the major tasks of the committee are:

• Providing IGS members with educational materials, such as leaflets and other documents, in different languages
• Providing links to geosynthetics-related doctoral theses and a list of geosynthetics textbooks
• Organizing webinars on different topics in geosynthetics
• Developing relationships with international sister societies by joint organization of activities, such as technical workshops
• Promoting undergraduate geosynthetics education through Educate the Educators (ETE) programs

Photos from ETE in Austin, Texas (July 2015)

• Arranging for translation of IGS leaflets into different languages, to improve the access to non-English speaking IGS members
• Arranging translation of the IGS movie on sustainability, with help from IGS Chapters
• Creating a web page for conducting Educated the Educators (ETE) programs
• Compilation of an international list of geosynthetics-related doctoral theses from around the world. The database will be made available to all IGS members through the IGS website.
• Contacting the authors of popular geotechnical textbooks to encourage them to include introductory chapters on geosynthetics
• Creating a dedicated website for planning and conducting webinars on a variety of geosynthetics topics

Photos from ETE in Austin, Texas (July 2015)

EDUCATION COMMITTEE EVENTS

Recent Meetings

• 26 September 2014 at Berlin, Germany.
• 22 June 2015 at Seoul, South Korea.

 
Future Meetings

• April 2016 during GeoAmericas 2016 (10 – 13 April 2016) in Miami, USA.
• ETE program in Asia by the middle of 2016 for members from Asian countries.

 
Workshops
An ETE workshop was conducted in Austin, Texas in July 2015 for promoting the introduction of geosynthetic topics in undergraduate engineering programs. More than 40 Civil and Geotechnical Engineering professors from the United States and Canada attended the program. An additional five countries (Egypt, China and Chinese Taipei, Indonesia, Peru, and Italy) sent representatives to evaluate the potential for ETE programs in their national engineering education programs.

The North American Geosynthetics Society (NAGS) hosted the Austin event and Minerva Technology, Resources, and Information (Minerva TRI) managed it. The non-commercial program was led by Prof. Richard Brachman (Queen’s University, Canada), Prof. Jorge Zornberg (University of Texas at Austin), and field veteran consultant Barry Christopher.