[Ica-osgeo-labs] Paper about FOSS into geospatial education

[Mueller, Thomas]

On a side note, I do not want to step on your toes. I am not interested for research just to show students different tools etc

Tom

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 20, 2015, at 10:34 PM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com<mailto:wenzeslaus at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear all,

I would like to let you know about an open access paper called *Integrating Free and Open Source Solutions into Geospatial Science Education* [1] which our group [2] published recently in a special issue of ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (thanks Suchith and other for organizing it).

>From our experience, when teaching geospatial thinking and analysis, software is often or even always involved. However, students tend to mix the theory with software specifics. Our solution is to teach theory and general ideas in lectures and use two different software packages in labs. With this approach, students get hands-on practice while getting the idea what is general principle and what is specific to one or the other software package.

Our flagship course is *Geospatial Analysis and Modeling* [3] and we use GRASS GIS and ArcGIS but the principle is obviously applicable to any course and any software. This modeling course is well-established and well-maintained since it runs every semester for several years already. The course material is licensed under CC BY-SA. You can find more information and more courses in the paper and on our website and I'll be happy to give you more details as well.

In the paper, we focus on graduate education but we hope to apply similar principles in undergraduate education too. However, for introduction to geospatial sciences at earlier levels (including high schools and middle schools), OpenStreetMap seems to me like a very good option because students can do something which actually has local or humanitarian impact while having the opportunity to analyze the collected data later in the course. OpenStreetMap community has already some resources on that topic as well as case studies [4].

Best regards,
Vaclav

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4020942
[2] http://geospatial.ncsu.edu/osgeorel
[3] http://courses.ncsu.edu/gis582/common
[4] http://teachosm.org
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