UAS Dacum: Purdue UAS as Reference

A Dacum: Why is it important and why use it here ?

A dacum, which stands for development of curriculum model, is effectively a way to gauge what is important to a field and the considerations needed to correctly teach a subject. Being that one must understand a wide arrange of skills to utilize unmanned aircraft systems, a dacum is particularly useful for the field. Organization of critical skills, career outlooks, and classes that correctly cover topics is important to insure a full mosaic of necessary skills is achieved. In particular, what is important could be different between academic programs. Being that anything involving drones is multidisciplinary, and the academic body proposing a degree in unmanned aerial systems should desire to train experts, I suggest a perhaps unorthodox viewpoint. A major consideration in a dacum for a program should involve as many courses different from the departments strengths as possible. This is because too much of a deficit on any one skill can be harmful to students' careers, unless they are capable of easily building up those skills on their own. In theory, classes and general day to day interactions should easily develop skills in a departments strength within the student body; but significant effort must be placed to develop weaker skills. For example, an engineering program offering a UAS degree should put enhanced effort into operational considerations, a geography program should put effort into the aircraft construction and report aspect, and an aviation program should invest heavily into the geospatial component of UAS. Thus, being that this dacum is written for an aviation department, I emphasized the current lack of geospatial knowledge in the curriculum.

Here is a link to the Dacum:

https://purdue0-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/ehockrid_purdue_edu/EbgCebHafClFvocDOv0N-wEBC27k9cywhyn4pPhV-0AItw?e=A8BJbG

It is important to note that the linked document is my modification on a class made version of the dacum that I contributed to. The only major differences are attempts to clean up categories that are perhaps repeats, very similar, and generally unclear. I also highlighted sections of the curriculum I feel are severely lacking. I will explain this further shortly.

Breaking Up the Model: Industry Trends

The first section is simply a list of industry trends. Some of these are specific uses for unmanned aircraft, others are developments in technologies or techniques that will impact drone users in coming years. Ultimately, people being educated on the subject should develop either a basal understanding of all the topics on the list, or be able to effectively utilize a UAS in any of the listed industries or tasks. While the list is not close to all encompassing, it is representative of skills that should be taught as part of a UAS collegiate education.

UAS Critical Skills and Knowledge

This section is a list of specific skill sets or knowledge bases students should have a handle on to excel in the UAS industry. It is important to understand students will have focuses and strengths and weaknesses, but a basic understanding is key. Across from the skills are lists of related classes. I would like to draw attention to the highlighted boxes in orange. These represent skills I feel are severely lacking as of now. Most namely computer programing, which is entirely absent. Other skills, such as remote sensing, are present in the course structure but definitely not enough. Basically, I feel the data aspects are not taught enough as of now. Ultimately, the final product customers will care about for UAS is the data product, not the aircraft itself. Students should be well versed in producing data based outcomes. Even students who intend to go into engineering should develop geospatial data skills because they need to understand what they are designing their platforms to do.

UAS Technician Key Duties 

 These are the primary tasks a UAS technician would accomplish within their job description. While many students may not go on to perform this specific job, it is fairly basal and broad, and certainly a role that many students could take. Thus, a great comparison job to understand if students are learning enough in their courses. The curriculum should in the least prepare students for all the tasks a UAS technician must accomplish. The category is split off further into sections such as operational consideration and maintenance. Once again, a technician can have a focus on any of the sub categories, but should reasonably be skilled in each. Looking through the potential tasks, there is certainly a discrepancy between the curriculum and the job regarding data related aspects and geospatial tasks. Ultimately, students need to have a fundamental understanding of how to handle the product that will ultimately be delivered to the final customer. This is something that is rarely touched on. Operating the aircraft, as well as maintaining it, are strong areas that the program currently prepares students for. However, as mentioned in the very beginning of this post, each student needs to be competent in all areas. Just as a technician would be useless if they could not fly, a technician is useless if they do not produce quality data.