[Geo4All] GeoAcademy course syllabi/goals? was: Introducing GeoAcademy GIS GeoBadges

[Tom Roche]

[footnotes follow .sig]

Tom Roche[1]
>> Can someone point me to syllabi or educational objectives for the GeoAcademy courses?

Rick Smith[2] (rearranged)
> I won't be able to move the materials until this end of this month. If you
> want the syllabi only, I can perhaps email them directly to you

Thanks for the offer, but this thread is mostly not for me (though I am interested in looking at the courses). My initial and ongoing interest is to send links to some folks I know who are unfortunately common in their opinion (which you've probably heard) that "FOSS GIS is nice, but it lacks good educational materials" (their standard being the locally-used bits of the vast curricula built around ArcGIS).

Rick Smith[2] (footnotes relocated)
> since we already have the open source lab material on my lab website[3] and GitHub[4],
> I will also move the syllabi and source lecture material to those locations as well.

Sounds good. Particularly, I would suggest

1. Rick+team to enhance the FOSS4G Academy Curriculum site[3] by making each course page link to (all of) the course's

1.1. syllabus (including KSA objectives)
1.2. lecture(s)
1.3. lab(s)
1.4. sources (on github)
1.5. registration page (more below)

That would IMHO make it a better frontend for prospective students and teachers.

2. GeoAcademy maintainers: distinguish better between course registration and course information (e.g., course objectives). Currently the relevant GeoAcademy page[5]

2.1. has a section titled 'The Curriculum' which links directly (and only) to each course-registration page (e.g., https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/YTHJ3E for 'GST 101 Introduction to Geospatial Technology')
2.2. has a section titled 'Open Source Curriculum' which links to the FOSS4G Academy Curriculum site[3].

So if a prospective student or teacher wants more information about a course, I suspect they will likely click the link to that course, at which they will get absolutely no information until they register for the course. This seems likely to produce a rather jarring user experience (presumably not desired :-)

IMHO (YMMV), GeoAcademy might want to simply link (with some explanatory text) to the (augmented) FOSS4G Academy Curriculum site, esp since there will {probably, hopefully, eventually} be additional providers of QGIS coursework (and there might be already).

FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-July/003043.html
[2]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-July/003055.html
[3]: http://spatialquerylab.com/foss4g-academy-curriculum/
[4]: https://github.com/FOSS4GAcademy
[5]: https://fossgeo.org/free-qgis-courses/