[OSGeo-Edu] [OSGeo-Discuss] Maps and the Geospatial Revolution from Jul 17th 2013 at Coursera

Wed Sep 4 03:18:26 PDT 2013

Hi Anthony,

It was good to meet you briefly at ICC 2013 in Dresden last week  and i hope i was able to provide basic information on ELOGeo and ICA-OSGeo Lab education initiatives.

It will be very helpful, if you can share your ideas and experiences to OSGeo Edu community so we can think of ideas for MOOC program entirely using OSGeo Software for the future. We also have an rapidly expanding ICA-OSGeo Lab Network. Details at  http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Edu_current_initiatives     (we are now working to setup a new portal)  and we hope you join the lab network.

We have monthly telemeetings which are open to all interested and  you are welcome to join. For example, our next telemeeting is tomorrow at 18:00 UTC. Agenda at  http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/ICA_OSGeo_Lab_Network_2013-09-05

We look forward to work with you on the education initiatives.

Best wishes,

Suchith

From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Cameron Shorter
Sent: 29 June 2013 23:23
To: Anthony C Robinson
Cc: 'OSGeo Discussions'; edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Maps and the Geospatial Revolution from Jul 17th 2013 at Coursera

Hello Anthony and others in the OSGeo Education space.

Anthony,
It seems your email is not getting through to our email lists, which is probably because you are not subscribed. I suggest doing so here: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss

All,
See Anthony's response below.
This email thread was started on the OSGeo Discuss list, but please continue on the edu-discuss list. In responding to this email, please drop the discuss at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:discuss at lists.osgeo.org> in response (and subscribe to the edu-discuss if you wish to follow along).

Anthony,
There have been quite a bit of discussion on our edu-discuss list about MOOCs, and so your course and what you have learned so far is very relevant to all of us.

The part of MOOC development which personally interests me (extending from my involvement in OSGeo-Live) is how to develop a process for maintaining and extending MOOC courses. In particular, from within the 30,000 students attending your course, there is likely to be many with excellent ideas for improvements. How do you capture such ideas, and at the same time retain the single focus and simplicity core to good educational material? How do you ensure that your material is updated whenever software is updated? How can your training material be retasked for a different audience (eg for primary school students)? Then once you have multiple courses all based upon the same core material, how do you ensure they all get updated together?

These are questions we have working on when generating documentation for OSGeo-Live, which I've described here:
http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/memoirs-of-cat-herder-coordinating.html

With regards to some of your other points, I'll be interested to hear responses from the Educators within the OSGeo community. (I'm better described as a Software Developer, Technical Writer and Coordinator).

On 30/06/13 03:20, ANTHONY C ROBINSON wrote:
Hi Cameron,

I really appreciate you touching base with me about this and sharing your discussions on my MOOC.

I hadn't yet seen the OSGeo-Live site or packages - this is great to know about and I will change my instructions in the class to point to these resources instead of the piece-by-piece approach I'd been taking with respect to highlighting various open source geo-efforts. While students in the class will use ArcGIS Online for 4 of the 5 lab assignments, for the final lab assignment I have created a tiered-approach with multiple options to hopefully encourage some of the most eager/tech savvy students to try out platforms like QGIS, GRASS, etc...

I'm aware of some OS community angst about my selection of AGOL for doing most of the labs in the course. I've worked for 10 years in the GeoVISTA Center, a GIScience research center that has been very active in developing open source systems for geovisualization and geocomputation. In addition, I lead Online Geospatial Education programs at Penn State, which to my knowledge represent the only Geography programs that provide Open Educational Resources for nearly all of its online courses (open.ems.psu.edu). So the clear value and innovation associated with all things open is not lost on me, and I recognize that there are some important considerations to be had with having MOOC students use a commercial platform. I won't answer all of them here ( and I would never claim to be an infallible decision maker), but it may be helpful to understand some of the motivation for this course and its design:

*         The class is designed for people who may use maps but have never made their own. It is not designed to teach GIS pros/academics something new. It's designed to encourage new geospatial people to emerge; to rethink maps and what they can do.

*         It is not designed to train people to use GIS software. The focus is on understanding the most basic things about Geography and Mapping. It functions much like a 1 credit zero-level class that we might teach here on campus.

*         A MOOC on Coursera typically reaches at least 30,000 people in its first run (mine will be no exception) and includes 60-75% of its students from outside the United States.

*         I chose a mapping platform that my Grandpa could realistically use (he's signed up for the class) in the first week of the class, and that would not require anything to be downloaded.

*         Esri is providing technical support in the course forums to ensure that nothing blows up and that problems are very quickly remedied. No money is associated at all with this relationship, and I approached them first because my former boss, David DiBiase, directs their education team and I knew he would understand what I did and did not want in terms of a partnership. I know they get a bad rap quite often (frequently for good reason) but I have to say that every part of this cooperation has been on my terms and excellent.

There are absolutely great ways to re-imagine this type of course with purely open source stuff driving lab assignments. Nothing would make me happier than to see the OsGeo community develop a second version of this class with different ways to complete the labs. I think that would be awesome. If I can be useful toward that end, please let me know.

I'm very interested in any advice folks can give me about the best ways to share the content I've developed for this course. Coursera doesn't make it easy for me to export the whole thing into a reusable package. We use Drupal here in our PSU programs to provide content, so my thought is to try and convert everything to that CMS and provide it in that manner. Others have suggested using GitHub, but I want to avoid simply uploading a pile of PDFs and Videos and assuming that that would be "good enough." Everything in the class will be offered under a CC non-commercial license at any rate - like our other open courseware at PSU.

I also can't imagine that there would only ever be one MOOC on Mapping. That's crazy. There ought to be just as many as we see now for various CompSci and Engineering topics. I'm very excited to share everything I learn from this experience, comparing it to how we develop other online courses (we offer ~25 here and I have 5 years of teaching geospatial stuff online), and considering the meaning of "open" when it comes to such things. I would agree with many critics that MOOCs themselves are not necessarily as "open" as they perhaps should be. Most of the big platforms (Coursera included) are trying to figure out a revenue stream from this stuff, for example, and as I've mentioned they definitely don't make it easy to repurpose things elsewhere.

The class is 99% ready to go and opens on July 17th. I would be very happy to hear any and all feedback (including, if you think its warranted, that I am a colossal idiot) once it's launched. Each week for five weeks a new lesson will roll out, with video lectures, lots of written/graphical content, lab assignments, and discussions on things like geospatial privacy, the impact of social media on mapping, etc... At the bare minimum it is very exciting to imagine what tens of thousands of people will do when they make their first maps.

TL:DR - I'll definitely point to the live.osgeo resources and making a MOOC is complicated but I am very eager to share what I learn. :)

Cheers,

-Anthony

Anthony C. Robinson, PhD
Lead Faculty for Online Geospatial Education, John A. Dutton e-Education Institute
Assistant Director, GeoVISTA Center
Department of Geography
The Pennsylvania State University
www.personal.psu.edu/acr181/<http://www.personal.psu.edu/acr181/>

From: Cameron Shorter [mailto:cameron.shorter at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 4:18 PM
To: Anthony Robinson
Cc: Rick Smith; Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas; OSGeo Discussions; edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Maps and the Geospatial Revolution from Jul 17th 2013 at Coursera

Hi Anthony,
As per emails below, you can see that people have been talking about your "Maps and the Geospatial Revolution" course within the Open Source Geospatial communities.

Are you aware of the OSGeo-Live USB/DVD/Virtual Machine?
http://live.osgeo.org
OSGeo-Live provides a distribution of 50 of the best Geospatial Open Source applications all preinstalled and configured with sample data, ready for use in courses such as yours. It also includes Project Overviews and Quickstarts for all these applications: http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/overview.html

I'm CCing the OSGeo Education email list, which are also doing great things. In particular, they have been building up a network of Open Source Geospatial Labs within Universities around the world.

On 28/06/2013 10:50 PM, Rick Smith wrote:
Myself and two colleagues are currently running a (mini)MOOC on geospatial technology.  We are using QGIS for two of the labs and indiemapper for two of the labs  We chose QGIS because we wanted to keep the 'Open' in MOOC truly open.  indiemapper is not open source, but it is free to use and there is no push for signing up for accounts or paying for services, so we think maybe it is little 'o' open  :)

Anyway, if interested, view http://catalyst-academy.org/course/geospatial-tech-for-stemx-learning/   and you can sign up for free at: https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/KK6JML<https://webmail.tamucc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=AC1eOI7a4kWyYoJN_gLUyI_cUUyQR9AI-WUGtL9ubS9qdamfDQFC_PqgbX6eM1v-Oy6o2IM0nd8.&URL=https%3a%2f%2fcanvas.instructure.com%2fenroll%2fKK6JML>

Cheers,
-Rick
http://gisc.tamucc.edu

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:25 AM, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas <jsanz at osgeo.org<mailto:jsanz at osgeo.org>> wrote:
On 28 June 2013 01:45, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net<mailto:mateusz at loskot.net>> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I thought there may be interest here:
>
> https://www.coursera.org/course/maps
>
> --
> Mateusz  Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Thanks for sharing

It's funny that this course relies only on a privative online mapping
platform, with the massive amount of free software and data resources
for learning available out there. I'd love to see a Coursera/or any
other MOOC using OSGeo Live!!

Cheers
--
Jorge Sanz
http://es.osgeo.org
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--

Cameron Shorter

Geospatial Solutions Manager

Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050

Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally

Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source

http://www.lisasoft.com

--

Cameron Shorter

Geospatial Solutions Manager

Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050

Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally

Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source

http://www.lisasoft.com

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