Some thoughts

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I had a few thoughts during and after the EduCom meeting today.  I
hesitate to butt in too much since I'm not really prepared to get too
involved.  But butting in my way, so here goes with a few suggestions.

I am very hopeful that this group will produce one or more fairly
complete "course kits" suitable for undergraduate courses taught using
open source geospatial software.  I think the place to start is something
along the lines of "Introduction to GIS", and add others as manpower and
need dictates.

I think these "kits" should include pretty much everything a course instructor
would need.  That means:
  o A course outline.
  o Detailed topics for each lecture (perhaps in the form of something like a
    powerpoint stack).
  o A set of lab assignments with detailed instructions to the students.
  o Pre-prepared datasets.
  o Pre-prepared software binaries for either Windows or Linux (or both),
    hopefully derived from some existing packaging effort (like MS4W,
    GRASS binaries, FGS, etc).  You might need to provide some prodding an
    support to one of these efforts.
  o Ideally one or more "open source" textbooks would be available, though
    I'm not sure how practical this would be.  Is there a freely downloadable
    version of the GRASS textbook?

I would *strongly* encourage identifying existing course efforts being made
by others, and building on them if at all possible.  It may be that this
group can take an existing effort, and help with preparing data and software
and packaging it up.  Then acting to promote and support it's use.

I think it is very important to work with one or more instructors who will
actually test-fly the course material in September.

For an introduction to GIS course, I hope you will think in terms of
instructors who aren't terribly computer savvy.  That is, part of the effort
is making things easy to use.

Expect to provide a "support" role.  That is, be prepared to answer questions
and help instructors who might take up the course material.

Expect to have to do a sales job to "sell" the course material.  Promote it
to associates, at educational meetings, via NGO's etc.

For an introductory course, expect to look beyond "hard core" geography
and GIS schools.  This might mean to schools that have a relatively modest
geographic/gis program, or undergrad schools in developing countries that
have somewhat limited resources.

As I see it, this source of "open source courseware" has too major goals.
One is to help promote open source software during the eductational process.
The other is to provide support in teaching "quality" GIS courses in
environments that might not normally have had the skills to build stuff from
scratch.

I think that support use of, and work on open source geospatial software in
academic research is also a very worthy goal of this group, but I'll let Ari
do some of the pushing on what would be needed for that.

I think preparing material for shorter term courses such as 1/2 day tutorials
for events such as FOSS4G or web courses is also desirable, but I don't know
if it makes sense to pursue them before an undergraduate course is completed
or not.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org