FW: [OSGeo-Edu] results of brief online survey about Open SourceGIS Training

[Landon Blake]

From: Landon Blake 
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 3:58 PM
To: 'Charlie Schweik'
Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Edu] results of brief online survey about Open SourceGIS Training

 

Charlie,

 

You wrote: “Sorry for my delay in responding back.”

 

No problem. I know we are all busy.

 

You wrote: “I'll let you digest my thoughts (for what they are worth) and then encourage you to post something to the group list to help promote and encourage dialog and group effort.”

 

I copied my response to the mailing list.

 

Charlie wrote: “I teach natural resource conservation students who are GIS users (applied users). Would the bottom three be geared more for GIS system developers? One naive question I have is what would be the reasoning for an applied GIS person to use a java-based system over some other system?”

 

The list of courses I mentioned in my previous e-mail probably looked the way they did for a few reasons:

 

1)      In my perspective all GIS practitioners should know how to do a little coding. This concept of users writing the code is the best part of open source. I think knowing how to sling a little code is also a very positive skill to have on the GIS resume.

2)      I bring a strong programming interest to my own application of GIS.

3)      Java is my favorite programming language. It is also the language OpenJUMP is written in.

 

I don’t necessarily think my list was the best list of courses on GIS, or necessarily the ones we should make available first, these are just some of the courses I would be comfortable preparing and teaching. I think the list reflects my personal background and bias with GIS. I should have made that more clear in my original e-mail. I could certainly come up with some course ideas that are less focused on programming, like “Advanced Vector Editing with OpenJUMP” or “Map Design with OpenJUMP and Inkscape”.

 

Charlie wrote: “This is raising an interesting issue too, because OpenJump I do not believe is an OSGeo affiliated project, but I see no reason not to have educational material listed in our inventory system for it. This is similar to MapWindow I think. Reactions there?”

 

OpenJUMP isn’t an OSGeo Project. I would use it in my course materials because it is the program I am most familiar with. My second choice would probably be MapWindow. OpenJUMP won’t be an OSGeo Project any time soon; we just lack the resources to get this done. So if that would be a requirement of our course material I would have to take another look at things. At the end of the day, I think it would be easiest to allow the use of any open source program that holds to the principles of OSGeo. I may be in the minority in that regard. GeoTools, is an OSGEO Project, and it is written in Java, so I could do some course material based on that library. I’ve contributed one simple module to GeoTools.

 

Charlie wrote: “I totally agree and am in sync with you on the modular approach. I have thought this for many years now...”

 

Awesome!

 

One thing I wonder about is how our module would be structured. How would be break a course module into individual lessons and determine how to measure student progress. I’m not sure what types of standards there are in place for modular remote education like this. Perhaps a discussion on this subject is the place to start.

 

Charlie wrote: “I think perhaps we need to do this in stages. Perhaps have an online course offered either for free to get the kinks out, or for pay but through some entity (maybe OSGeo)? They had a Moodle server set up a while back. Maybe we could ask Tyler Mitchell?”

 

A free course to work the kinks out seems like a good idea. I took a look at Moodle, but it seemed like it might be overkill. At least to start, I don’t think we need to worry about tracking sessions for students and things like that to start. I think a simple web page that listed the data, videos, podcasts, screencasts, and sample data for each lesson. I could work on a sample course web page that followed this simple structure. (Sounds like a good candidate for a standard web format.) Presenting the data in this simple way (without requiring site registration and other hoopla) seems like a good way to go.

 

Charlie wrote: “So see if we could get some of these modular courses operational and delivered, and then after this is working then we see how it might be connected to universities. What do you think?”

 

A good way to move forward.

 

Charlie wrote: “I did an online course for QGIS (Intro to GIS with QGIS) and it was no small effort. It required the content and exercise data to be available (I used camtasia to record lectures). It required online office hours via chat or maybe Skype. It was time consuming. That is an issue…”

 

It is a lot of work. To start, we might not be able to teach the courses. Getting them online for self-study is a first step. Still, it wouldn’t be that hard to set-up a mailing list if we had a few students taking the courses.

 

Charlie wrote: “What do you think would be the best course to offer?”

 

That is a question I should be asking you as the professor! Do you think a basic GIS course would be best to start? If so, I could take a crack at fleshing out the course outline for the “Introduction to Vector GIS with OpenJUMP” course. 

 

I’ll wait for further discussion to see what I can start work on.

 

Landon

 



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