COVID-19 has impacted us in many ways. There is an increasing number of institutions who are temporarily postponing or cancelling in-person courses, and on-ground faculty may be faced with having to migrate their courses to online learning. Of course, planning, available support, and clear communication are paramount to helping make such transition and ease both faculty and student anxiety.
We wanted to share several online resources that are available to supplement online learning. You likely know many of them, but they could be a lifeline for those faculty who have not utilized them, as many of these resources are conducive to remote and self-paced student learning.
- Learn ArcGIS – a wonderful collection of short and focused lessons. A relatively new option is the notion of Paths, feel free to browse them.
- Esri Training – search web courses and explore notion of a “learning plans”.
- ArcGIS Documentation – lots of tutorials depending on technology focus. Hiding in there are gems such as these Analytics case studies, many of which have accompanying Story Map, data, and guided workflows, for example.
- Esri Press books, available at no cost to students and instructors until May 25th via the VitalSource Helps program. FAQ for students/educators is here.
- Developer Labs – for students in programming-related courses
- Esri Video channel
- Explore ArcGIS Blog and pose questions such as How can local governments respond to COVIT-19.
- Specific examples: Have students explore and utilize collections of StoryMaps to present their work, publish Surveys to gather information about a topic, use ArcGIS Online to explore, create, analyze information.
We would like to express particular appreciation and support to the many colleagues whose role is to support educators across campuses leverage geospatial technology. Folks sitting in libraries, instructional resource centers and technology support offices, may be faced with increased demand to provide support for moving courses to remote instruction.
Further, we have a close community of GIS educators – a community who has inspired and supported one another. If you have advice to offer, or need advice on approaches to transition courses, please feel free to post here. If a virtual meeting space is a desired mode to share practices, we can help facilitate that.
