Under the Semester System, the one-year M.S. Degree in Disaster Science and Management (DSM) at the University of Dhaka is a program comprised of two semesters. Duration of each semester is 26 weeks. Students are required to attend the entire courses equivalent to 35 credit hours in Disaster Science and Management (DSM) Master’s program to obtain the degree.
There will be two groups in Masters Courses in Disaster Science and Management. One group will be termed as Masters by project work- Project Group and the other will be termed as Masters by research work - Thesis Group. Students of both Groups will have to take a total of 35 credit hours equivalent courses.
Admission Details:
Degree Requirements: Students normally have an undergraduate honours degree or above.
Subject-specific Requirements: Qualification should be in Disaster Science and Management.
Credit: Students are required to attend the entire courses equivalent to 35 credit hours in Disaster Science and Management (DSM) Master’s program to obtain the degree.
Groups: There will be two groups in Masters Courses in Disaster Science and Management. One group will be termed as Masters by project work- Project Group and the other will be termed as Masters by research work - Thesis Group. Students of both Groups will have to take a total of 35 credit hours equivalent courses.
Thesis Group will have to take five theory courses equaling 15 credits hours, one specialized course equivalent to 3 credit hours, two laboratory course equaling 6 credit hours and one comprehensive oral exam of 2 credit hours totaling 26 credit hours designated as Compulsory Courses. Moreover, they have to pursue research work equivalent to 9 credit hours.
Project Group will have to take 21 credit hours equivalent theory & specialized courses, 9 credit hours equivalent three laboratory courses and one comprehensive oral exam of 2 credit hours totaling 32 credit hours designated as Compulsory Courses. Moreover, they have to pursue project work equivalent to 3 credit hours.
Final Degree Eligibility: For MS degree a student need to complete 35 credit hours without F grade in any course.
14 courses · 47 credit hours across 2 terms
| Code | Course title | Credits | |
|---|---|---|---|
| DSMMT 501 | Disaster Impact Assessment | 3 | Natural disasters cause terrific human suffering. They also create substantial physical and economic damage, which can spill over outside the disaster area. As a result, disasters may destroy a country’s overall economic development temporarily, or permanently. There is relationship between natural disasters and economic growth. So proper mitigation and adaption options are required to lessen the impact of disasters on economic and social aspects. This course is, therefore, to exercise the tools and techniques that can be applied/adopted to assess the disaster impact and their mitigation options. |
| DSMMT 502 | Humanitarian Emergency & Crisis Management | 3 | Nowadays, we are facing many humanitarian emergency and crisis all over the world due to disasters, arms conflict and terrorism. In this course students will get ideas about humanitarian emergency & crisis, their origin, management etc. elaborately. |
| DSMMT 503 | Urban Resilience: Theory and Practices | 3 | Cities grow faster and every day the urban areas are being increased, which creates pressure on exiting infrastructures/facilities, economy and standard of living. Again, the growth of urban areas is not as much as the growth of population. As a result, the urban population density is hiking always that increases the exposure to the human lives to the urban disaster like earthquake, flood, and fire and build collapse etc. This leads to make urban setting vulnerable day by day. So to make urban areas more resilient is a great concern for city / disaster management authority and urban dwellers. To avoid losses from disasters, and to prevent affected citizens from falling into poverty, improved urban resilience can safeguard for its generations. Hence this course is designed to highlight the theories, techniques and best practices for attaining urban resilience in a sustainable way. |
| DSMMT 504 | Climatic Risk Assessment and Extreme Event Modeling | 3 | Day by day extreme atmospheric events are increasing due to climate change. In this course student will learn about the climatic risk assessment techniques use model to predict extreme climatic events. |
| DSMMT 505 | Integrated Water and Agricultural Risk Management | 3 | This Course will provide insight knowledge on different theory and available tools in this area to deal with water and agricultural risk managements. This course covers wide ranges of risk and possible solutions on water and agricultural aspects. |
| DSMML 506 | Advanced Research Methodology | 3 | This course will provide an opportunity for students to establish or advance their understanding of research through critical exploration of research language, ethics, and approaches. The course introduces the language of research, ethical principles and challenges, and the elements of the research process within quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches. Students will use these theoretical underpinnings to begin to critically review literature relevant to their field or interests and determine how research findings are useful in forming their understanding of their work, social, local and global environment. Based on the learning, the students will prepare their thesis/project proposal in this course. In addition, the ideal format for submitting a project proposal to achieve research grant will also be addressed in this course. Finally, students should able to know how to present the expected project outcomes to the professional audience. |
| DSMML 507 | Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS | 3 | Remote Sensing (RS) dataset is widely being used, nowadays, in Disaster Management Cycle. Effective disaster management needs information before, during and after the event for risk reduction, response and crisis management. So real time data or data of temporal nature is essential for proper disaster management (DM). DM also needs data of remote and inaccessible areas. These needs of DM make Remote Sensing data is a must. On the other hand, GIS is a tool to accommodate data from various sources like, RS, GPS (Global Positioning System), field survey (spatial and non-spatial info) and data from other sources or thematic areas to perform analysis for suggesting options for taking appropriate decision for DM. Also GIS is a strong platform for data visualization for individual thematic area and a mashup of different themes. |
| Code | Course title | Credits | |
|---|---|---|---|
| DSMMT 508 | Institutional, Organizational & Social System | 3 | This course introduces students about the objective of linking broad organizational and institutional social forces in the field of disaster management. Through this course Students will develop understanding of the disaster management perspective through study of content and the processes used by disaster managers to discover, describe, explain, and/or predict the institutional, organizational and social systems. Students must understand the diversities and complexities of the organizational and social world, past and present, from a critical analytical perspective, and methodologies, and come to an informed sense of contemporary disaster management approaches. This course will give students a grounded experience of how disasters impact on people and their societies, their political cultures and institutions. This course is designed to emphasize: The ability to see how individual lives are connected with wider social and cultural processes and forces; and the ability to work both independently and cooperatively in the application of sociological or anthropological ideas. |
| DSMMT 509 | Disaster Statistics and Economic Modeling | 3 | Disaster affects economy in a numerous way. Understanding the real scenario of disaster impact scenario and make the society resilience proper estimation of communities’ capacity is required. This advance course will focus on analysis of dynamic behavior of economic shift and changes due to disaster and possible solutions. |
| DSMMT 510 | Public Policy and Governance for Disaster Management | 3 | This course discusses disaster governance and global policy perspectives for Disaster Management. The course will describe in detail the necessary steps for the measurement of indicators, including the information to be compiled, the assessment process, recommendations for public policy and examples based on the application conducted on governance related to disaster management in different regions as well as in Bangladesh. The course will take the student into the intersecting research communities of development, disasters, public policy, governance and poverty alleviation in studying how disasters impact on human, social and political behavior, and how disaster impacted populations respond to these crisis events in the context of disaster management approach. |
| DSMML 511 | Geo-hazard Modeling and Mapping | 3 | There has been a paradigm shift in disaster management approach from being crisis management oriented towards risk management focused. This course comprises of developing the generic and scenario based risk modeling of the major natural hazards and spatial analysis techniques. |
| DSMMP 512 | Masters Project Work | 3 | In this course students will select a small research topic. Then conduct research under supervision of faculty member and present their outcomes as verbal presentation as well as written form |
| DSMMP 513 | Thesis Work | 9 | In this course students will select a research topic. Then conduct research under supervision of faculty member and present their outcomes as verbal presentation as well as written form. |
| DSMMV 514 | Viva vocé | 2 | Viva vocé (“living voice”), by tradition, is an oral examination that is carried out not as a substitute, but to complement the written exam. The course is designed to ensure the development of the student’s ability to apply, analyze, evaluate and create using the acquired knowledge along with the ability to remember and understand. This course is unique in a sense that it does not have a scheduled class time but the all the courses up to 2nd semester and before constitutes the syllabus. Also, this course is designed to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the subject as a whole with clear a conceptual framework which can help the students explain, evaluate and create the correlations among the individual courses. |