[Qgis-developer] Teaching with Qgis

[Alex Mandel]

On 11/16/2011 07:46 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> The GIS teaching in our environmental faculty here uses commercial GIS
> software. There is some mumbling about introducing Open Source but
> this year's students will not have the pleasure.
> 
> As I've expressed an interest in teaching with Qgis, I thought I would
> have a look at some typical GIS teaching examples and see how well
> they translate to Qgis. I found this very nice set of lessons:
> 
> http://www.umaine.edu/mial/int527/labs.htm
> 
> and I plan to work through them, noting annoyances, problems, etc with
> doing the exercises in Qgis. If anyone else is interested in
> contributing then we should set up a shared space (google docs?) for
> comments and discussion.
> 
>  A few things cropped up almost instantly:
> 
>  * Qgis' vector-raster tool doesn't let you choose character
> attributes (ArcGIS automatically converts characters to numbers)
>  * The vector-raster output grid specification can only be given as
> number of cells - you can't tell it to output the same raster grid as
> an existing raster, which is what you want to do if you are going to
> do overlays.
>  * Having two different file selectors (one Qt, one Linux native) is
> an annoyance
>  * Raster layers loading as flat gray rectangles is another annoyance
> - I shouldn't have to go to Properties and fiddle to see something.
> 
> Obviously I'll file bugs and enhancements in the tracker, and keep an
> eye open to see how many things are targetted for the next version,
> and maybe even submit some code myself. But it'll be a good exercise
> to go through a set of real-world exercises in Qgis to see how it
> compares.
> 
>  I know its very easy to put together a good set of teaching materials
> from scratch using Qgis since you tend to show off the things that you
> know are easily doable in Qgis, but starting with someone else's
> materials should show how flexible Qgis is in doing GIS analysis. Or
> so I hope!
> 
>  Anyone else interested?
> 
> Barry

Barry,

There is a lot of room here since you didn't define what the focus of
your course would be and who your target audience is. There was a good
presentation at FOSS4G from a Librarian at CUNY who teaches Intro to GIS
in an 8 hour workshop.
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/

Then there's Richard Plant's labs for QGIS which are actually a direct
conversion of the Proprietary labs he taught in his 10 week course for
many years that focused on spatial analysis (not 100% up to date with
latest QGIS methods). He specifically brought in GRASS and R whenever a
task wasn't suited to QGIS directly.
http://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/plant/qgislabs.htm

Also look up Helena Mitasova's courses that exclusively use GRASS for
advanced spatial anaylsis.

I've also been a teaching assistant for a course on GIS
scripting/informatics and we do Arc, GDAL/OGR and QGIS all via python.
Similar to the course from Utah listed on the GDAL trac site.

One note, the Grey raster on load is not unique to QGIS, got similar
issues with Arc teaching this quarter. It depends some on the Raster
file itself and the underlying libraries. I had that problem on QGIS
1.5/1.6 but it went away with 1.7 I believe due to an upgrade or fix in
GDAL.

My observation having worked with several professors on these types of
courses is that you have to define your target concepts and skills you
want students to walk away with after the course. Then tailor the
exercises to re-enforce those specific tasks. If it's an introduction
course avoid showboating of super unique features that are not
fundamental to basic GIS.

I'd be interested in discussing this more in depth and think the
OSGeo-Edu mailing list might be a better place.

Thanks,
Alex