16 New Lessons as part of a Fundamentals of GIS Short Course
I created 16 new lessons to support a fundamentals of GIS short course. I have rigorously tested, taught, and refined these lessons over the past few months and wanted to make them available to the wider community so that you can use or modify them for your own purposes. The lessons are aimed at undergraduate-level learners, but I have also used them for the GIS professional community, and one could also use them for upper secondary school students.
The content covers are wide variety of themes (water, population, hazards, more) and scales (local to global), and is focused on web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) GIS, specifically, ArcGIS Online. The tools used include the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, ArcGIS StoryMaps, dashboards, Survey123, instant apps, and other tools. The goal is that working through these activities, you will gain confidence in mapping, spatial thinking, working with spatial data, spatial analysis, saving, sharing, and communicating the results of your work.
To access all content, see this ArcGIS StoryMap collection:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/b9292c1494224ff8bf8ebd31424ff917 A StoryMap collection was the perfect tool to use to allow learners to quickly and easily access the activities, which are accessed through 3 story maps that you will see in the collection. A collection also allows me to easily update the content as needed. I encourage you to create a StoryMap collection to support your own instruction. Alternatively, attached to this essay are 3 PDFs containing the 16 lessons.
The short course content is as follows:
Part 1: Spatial is Special!
Ways to define and conceptualize GIS
What are maps? Why are they relevant to 21st Century decision making?
GIS software and organizations
The whys of where
Activity 1: Spatial and attribute characteristics
The modern GIS platform: Maps, layers, apps, data services
Part 2: Let’s Get Mapping!
Activity 2: A field survey, map, dashboard, and story map
Activity 3: Symbology: Single symbol, graduated symbol, predominance maps, pie charts, ring chart maps
Activity 4: Creating expressions; analyzing change over space and time
Activity 5: Filtering data and working with isolines
Part 3: Investigating Relationships
Activity 6: Bivariate and relationship mapping
Activity 7: Analyzing relationships with scatter plots and maps
Part 4: How to get Data into a GIS
Activity 8: Mapping a spreadsheet. Discussion: Vector data, imagery, raster data
Activity 9: Creating a field survey and online map
Mappy Time! Discuss favorite maps and map-related books.
Part 5: Communicating Your Results
Demonstrate: Web Mapping applications including Living Atlas of the World apps
Activity 10: Creating a dashboard
Activity 11: Creating a story map
Activity 12: Spatial Analysis I: Natural Hazards
Discussion on sharing – when and how to do it
Part 6: Spatial Analysis
Activity 13: Spatial Analysis II : Invasive species
Activity 14: Deep learning feature extraction from satellite imagery
Activity 15: Land Records Mapping, analysis, and visualization
Activity 16: 3D visualization and analysis
Part 7: GIS Workflows and Considerations
GIS content organization
ArcGIS Pro and GIS tools
Data quality and the ethics of mapping.
Continuing your GIS journey:
Resources for moving forward:
Books, organizations, tutorials, associations, networks, events.
One of the things I like most about using StoryMaps as teaching tools is the sidecar capabilities. For example, in Activity 15, and in many other activities, I place the directions on the left and the interactive web map in ArcGIS Online on the right, so the student can see the instructions while they are working through the lesson on the right (or, alternatively, popping the right side into a separate tab so they will have more space in which to work).
Lastly, like many other rigorous sets of curriculum, developing the above was aided by collaboration and networking. For example, my work with the Wisconsin Land Information Association (WLIA) connected me to the wonderful Washington County Wisconsin GIS staff, who have created an amazing data portal, the data from which I used, with their permission, for the above Activity #15.
Below is a screen shot from the lessons themselves. I look forward to your reactions.
--Joseph Kerski
