**6. From global to local: The case of geomatics at Yanbu Industrial College**

The Geomatics Technologies Department at Yanbu Industrial College is facing the problem of low student enrolment. Since the department was created in 2003, student enrolment has not been more than 24 in a year. In addition, the department has not been able to attract high quality students. This poses a challenge of identifying the learning and teaching approach that will increase student motivation, retention and performance. The situation is similar to that of some other geomatics department around the world experiencing low patronage or even closure. The department has taken some measures to reverse this trend. One of the measures is to take the opportunity of the college's drive towards studentcentred learning (Matmti and Delany, 2011; Delany, 2011) to reinvigorate the department and transform student learning experience.

The active learning case study that is presented in this article was implemented in teaching two geomatics courses in remote sensing and GIS. There were ten and six students in the remote sensing and GIS classes respectively. Two methods, group discussion and learning by teaching, were adopted in infusing active learning in the courses. In the group discussion, the study material was given to the student to study before the class. In the class, the students were paired into groups and each group was asked to discuss the material and write down two important ideas they understand from the material and two ideas they do not fully understand. Thereafter, a student from each group was asked to explain to the class the ideas they understand and other ideas (difficult to understand) were thrown open for discussion.

The learning by teaching method was based on presentations by the students. The students were divided into groups. Each group was given a topic from the course module to prepare a presentation on. Each group made presentation on the assigned topic in class and other class members had to take note of important points in the presentation. The teacher served as a facilitator in these two approaches by clearing misconceptions about the subject matter, guiding the students on the concepts to focus on and getting feedback from the students. The following sections present the results of the assessment of the methods (as mentioned in the methodology section).
