ONLINE CONTINUING EDUCATION IN GIS AND GEOGRAPHICAL DATA QUALITY - SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING - URUGUAY

Since the 90’s, the School of Engineering at the Universidad de la República (UdelaR), has been doing diverse continuing education activities for professionals, in particular on-site professional development courses with the objective of connect them with the new technologies not learned during their undergraduate studies. Since 2010, the Geospatial Information Technologies Group (Grupo de Tecnología de la Información Geoespacial, GTIG), integrated by professors from the Computer Department and the Surveying Department, with the support of a professor specialist in geographical data quality, from Spain, has been dictating the first online Professional Development course of the Surveying Department titled “La Herramienta SIG y la Calidad de la Información Geográfica” (“The GIS tool and the Geographical Data Quality”).
This course was taken by professionals coming from diverse disciplines and from different parts of the country. This is a great success especially for a university that is mostly concentrated in Montevideo, the capital of the country. The syllabus contained the following topics: Introduction to GIS, Geographic Databases, and Geographical Data Quality. The course was developed in 7 weeks and was dictated using an online education platform called “EVA” (Entorno Virtual de Aprendizaje developed with Moodle) that has been available in the School of Engineering since mid-2010.
The present document describes the pedagogical proposal used in the course, as well as lessons learned. For instance, it was evident that the context in which the course is developed is very important, not only is necessary to have a good technical support team but also a good coordination from the registration of the participants to the end of the course.