35
Arctic Yearbook 2014
In an effort to meet this dual demand the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) established the
Arctic Technology Centre – colloquially called ARTEK – in 2001 in cooperation with the Greenland
Home Rule (now Self Rule). The primary goal of the establishment of ARTEK was to establish an
Arctic engineering education rooted in Greenland, while the center also serves as a coordinating
framework for research in Arctic engineering.
It was decided that the program’s first three semesters would be taught in Greenland, to give the
Greenlandic students a chance to acclimatize to the academic world, while ensuring an Arctic profile
and anchoring of the program. Recognizing that it would be difficult to ensure the necessary
academic level if the entire program was carried out in Greenland due to the expense of providing
qualified instructors and necessary experimental equipment, the remaining part of the program,
except a one-semester internship in the Arctic, is located at the Copenhagen campus of Technical
University of Denmark (DTU).
This is a Bachelor of Engineering program, which in Denmark usually takes three and a half years. It
is basically a civil engineering education, but to give the necessary time and space for an Arctic
dimension and to differentiate it from other civil engineering programs, the Arctic engineering
program is extended by six months. The Arctic students have studied a semester more than the
students they are going to study with, when they move to Denmark. This gives the students whose
first language is Greenlandic a better basis for studying in Denmark.
The students have the opportunity to specialize in the following areas: Buildings (building design
and load bearing structures), Facilities (indoor air quality, building energy and HVAC), Construction
(rocks, permafrost and raw materials), Environment (water, sewage, waste and environmental impact
assessment), and Planning (infrastructure, local and regional planning).
To exploit workshop facilities and synergy in educational cooperation the Arctic engineering
program and thus ARTEK, was placed physically at Sanaartornermik Ilinniarfik (now Teknikimik
Ilinniarfik - KTI) in Sisimiut, which in addition to the vocational school also includes a high school.
Sisimiut is Greenland’s second largest city with approximately 5,500 inhabitants. The Arctic
engineering program accepts 20-24 students per year, of which approximately two-thirds comes
from Greenland, while the remainder are primarily Danish. The language of instruction is Danish, as
is the case for much of the higher education in Greenland. To ensure the necessary professional
expertise in teaching, teachers from DTU and consultancy companies in Denmark, other
universities, and from Greenland consultancies and municipalities, are used continuously. In total
about 30 teachers account for the three semesters, that is organized with a few major
interdisciplinary courses that are run consecutively (Christensen 2008). Teaching at DTU in
Denmark usually is run with parallel courses throughout the semester.
The model, where the students are starting with three semesters in Sisimiut then moving to
Denmark, combined with the fact that the education in Greenland relies on external instructors, has
proven to be an academic success because on the one hand it guarantees a local foundation and on
the other hand it has great resources to draw upon to guarantee the quality of the education. The
Hendriksen & Christensen