STRAKOS, Vladimir
Faculty of Mining and Geology, Inst. 545, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, vladimir.strakos@vsb.cz
Abstract: Under the existing conditions of highly developed specialized fields, specialists in various fields of mining activity are educated at mining faculties. A small mining company of low production, one of many such companies that have been existing all over the world, cannot afford to have several specialists to manage the mine. In a lot of points of the world, we can meet mining companies where merely one graduate engineer works, and the others come from technical schools. This is the situation that forces us to be concerned with the idea of educating the future manager of a smaller mine. Such a manager should have an extensive knowledge of needful fields connected with mining activity.
This means the permanent knowledge of all the fields related to the building, operation and completion of mining activity. This knowledge cannot be so wide as in the case of specialists but the graduate must accept foundations that he never will forget. The permanent knowledge can be obtained by training, which can be performed very easy at present, because we can try to make many practical decisions using the computer models, GISs and virtual reality. Just for the creation of such models it will be suitable to uniform the syllabi in the whole world and to use the common textbooks and teaching programs.
Keywords: mining, geology, mechanization, cybernetic, economy
Planning a good study programme for any field of study is a complicate matter that will demand the sufficient professional and pedagogical experience and the ability of the men not to prefer their own specializations. This is the main reason why I am engaged on these problems, although I am not a mining engineer. However, for many years I have been concerned with mining problems related to the automation of mining processes on all levels of control. This is also the reason why I have not consulted the content of this contribution with any specialist in advance. Now I am ready to accept a lot of critical remarks.
What is the main motive for these considerations is the fact that I have visited many smaller mines and surface mines all over the world where it has not been economical to employ highly specialized and closely orientated specialist engineers and where the manager educated at a university must help himself and on his own responsibility. My second view on activities of the manager of a mining company is based on the belief that the present exploitation is not possible without mechanization, electrification, automation, utilization of computer models, and others.
We, university teachers, must bear in our minds that what students learn nowadays can be utilized only after several years. Therefore, we must teach them the foundations of required disciplines so that they may remember them permanently. This helps them find other needful knowledge from the specialized literature.
As already given in Introduction, the aim is to educate a manager having a deep knowledge of foundations of fields related to mining activity. I am convinced that the lesser extent of knowledge trained well is better than the greater extent of knowledge that is not retained permanently in memory.
It is not easy to teach the future mining engineer what is and what is not important. It will certainly cause an extensive discussion and this is the reason why this paper has been written.
First I shall divide the given problems of teaching into the following thematic ranges:
In connection with this or other division, three important issues arise, namely:
For the present, I suggest the following percentual division, and thus the total number of lessons in the five-year study programme having the weekly capacity of 30 lessons and 15 week semesters:
| Engineering foundation Specialized disciplines Economics Social sciences |
20% 53% 15% 12% |
4 500 lessons 11 950 lessons 3 375 lessons 2 700 lessons |
Various opinions of such a division can exist. Moreover, the contents of particular thematic ranges should be taken into account as well.
The time schedule of the thematic ranges represents another problem for discussion. I shall present merely three possibilities that I consider to be rational. Nevertheless, I am not sure which is really the best of them. Let us illustrate the total number of lessons in a diagram, where the number of lessons per week is plotted on the vertical axis and the number of semesters on the horizontal axis.
Figure 1. Three variants of a possible division of thematic ranges.
B - engineering foundation; S - social sciences; E - economics; P - specialized disciplines.
The division of engineering foundations of study and social sciences is not, in principle, very problematical. However, it is the division of economic disciplines that is debatable. More economic subjects should be taught in the end of study (variants 1, 3), or conversely (variant 2). I prefer the variant 3. It means that fewer "specialized" subjects should be taught in the end of study.
Now I already cannot avoid the question concerning the specialized themes.
I recommend dividing the content of the specialized thematic range into the following areas:
When considering the time schedules of individual disciplines I was concerned with many possibilities. I regard one of them shown in Fig.2 as rational. This means that geology will be taught in the very beginning of study with a gradual increase in the number of lessons.
Figure 2. Time schedule of specialized ranges
In the second half of study the amount of geological lessons will decline again. The proper mining disciplines will begin approximately in the second half of study at the permanently increasing volume. I suppose the other three thematic ranges to be in the following order: Electrical engineering, mechanization and automation.
Thus we arrive at the time that can be devoted to particular ranges. However, it is not possible to decide this question without specifying the content of particular parts. This represents a very difficult problem, but I cannot avoid it and thus I, at least preliminarily suggest the following:
| GEOLOGY 13% = 2 925 lessons |
mineralogy and petrography, general geology, economic geology, hydrogeology | ||
| MINING 23% = 5 175 lessons |
geomechanics geodesy ventilation and safety engineering mineral processing |
gas exploitation underground mining open-cast mining exploitation from water |
coal ores coal ores industrial minerals |
| ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING 5% = 1 125 lessons |
electrical engineering electronics |
motors and generators switching devices distribution systems lighting | |
| MECHANIZATION 7% = 1 575 lessons |
mechanics parts of machines technical drawing |
drilling machines mining machines transport treatment plants | |
| CYBERNETICS 5% = 1 125 lessons |
theory of systems theory of control |
technical means automation modelling and simulation |
power devices mining machines transport treatment |
Now we can think of time that can be devoted to particular sciences. The responsible decision must be made only after specification of particular subjects and their contents, which is not the task for one teacher, and thus let us take my above presented proposal as a rough basis for a discussion.
I cannot make any conclusion on these problems because this is the case of work material. This is the material intended for a discussion. This is the material for considerations on the shortage of time that can be allotted to individual sciences and specialized disciplines. It is necessary to consider carefully the content of particular subjects and elaborate it into a detailed programme. If teachers from more universities of the world agree on such a conception and if we introduce uniform programmes of study in mining, then we can write uniform English textbooks.
Then we can issue teaching texts of good quality, whose content will have a long-term validity. Moreover, future innovations following from better understanding the natural laws and the next development in techniques will be gradually added. Thus we shall approach my design that students can study whichever semester at whichever university in whichever country and teachers can give their lectures at whichever university offering mining education in the world.
The proposed conception does not, however, exclude the next education of graduate engineers-specialists, e.g. in the form of post-graduate study.