Abstract:

Teaching Geographic Information Systems courses online offers certain unique challenges. Faculty are tasked with transitioning a traditional lecture with lab sessions to the online environment, with all its affordances and limitations. The labs, integral to student success, require access to specialized software, large amounts of data with which to work; a variety of media and techniques; and a significant amount of supervision, feedback, and engagement from the instructor while moving from one module to another. The students final project integrates their learning from the semester into a single set of problems and solutions.

This paper presents experiences and observations from transitioning just such a lab-intensive face-to-face course at the University of Georgia, US: “Advanced Geographic Information Systems” to a fully online course. The course was selected for development as part of a competitive fellowship offered through the Office of Online Learning, UGAonline. Since the course was offered before on-campus, in a traditional face-to-face setting, the course design was modified to be offered online and implemented through the UGA Learning Management System (LMS) elcNEW , powered by Desire2Learn. The software for the GIS course is ArcGIS 10.0, with student licenses provided by ESRI (Environmental System Research Institute).

Recent experiences from other universities offering introductory GIS courses (Penn State University) have been successful, and indicate that not only are these courses attractive to the online learner, but also, and perhaps surprisingly, that the online learner can benefit from affordances of the environment. This paper is intended to provide a summary of student’s experience, from a course survey and other evaluation resources, and the methods that proved to be more effective to the design and implementation of the course.

Keywords:

Technology, Online, Teaching, Geographic Information Systems.