A new workshop on how to use, create, and teach with ArcGIS Dashboards
ArcGIS Dashboards combine interactive maps, charts, tables, indicators, and other visual elements to communicate the results of any place-based investigation. They offer a rich display of information in a small amount of space--such as a single screen. They provide faculty and students with powerful and compelling tools that make it very useful for teaching and research. How can you get started with ArcGIS Dashboards, particularly if you are a student, or teacher, or professor, or researcher? The workshop described in this essay includes video and text components, along with a set of hands-on activities that you can follow to create the dashboards in this workshop and extend to dashboards on topics that you are interested in.
Selected images from this ArcGIS Dashboards workshop.
The purposes of this workshop are to:
1. Understand where and how dashboards fit into the ArcGIS system.
2. Gain skills in creating and maintaining dashboards.
3. Gain confidence that you can use dashboards in your instruction, research, campus operations, and in your own career path.
4. Connect you to Esri support and resources available to you as instructors, researchers, operations managers, and students.
See the attached slides and the videos in this playlist for the workshop's content. The playlist includes the full workshop, and also the contents as split up into 6 parts if you prefer. Each part builds on the part before it in a scaffolded way designed to enhance learning and skill-building. I would like to acknowledge my Esri colleague Eric Wagner for his technical assistance in helping me with this workshop. The workshop focuses on mapping and analyzing tree species and health in New York City, but you can apply these ideas and techniques to study literally any topic or theme.
ArcGIS Dashboards are map-centric web applications containing interactive elements to draw the users' attention to specific items or data feeds. They are intuitive and quick means of sharing data within an organization or with outside audiences. They simplify the display of complex information. They look clean and are simple to configure, with no coding required. But with some coding skills on your toolbelt, they offer even more power.
Dashboards offer several advantages in education: They are a part of the ArcGIS platform and are therefore connected to maps, apps, layers, analysis tools, and more. They allow for quick and powerful visualizations. They allow you to share data within a research team, between universities, or with a wider audience such as the general public. They are in high demand in the workplace, are compelling, and help people understand the world and solve problems. They encourage you as the dashboard creator to consider scale, symbology, classification, and other mapping and communication skills. They focus attention to where needed, communicate at a glance, and help people spot what really matters. Especially relevant to education is that dashboards can be used and created by students and faculty who are just beginning their journey with GIS, but also can be used by intermediate and advanced users who extend dashboard capabilities with Arcade scripts and other tools.
Everyone on the planet with a device has seen the JHU Covid Dashboard. This, and tens of thousands of other dashboards, have been created and are used on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis to examine everything from human health, water quality, weather, traffic accidents, crime, real-time wildfire perimeters, energy use, work orders, citizen science projects, and a myriad of other disciplines and settings in scales from local to global.
What do you need to get started? You need a focused idea of what you want to show for others to see, GIS data layers and a map, attributes that you wan to summarize, show, or count, and a creator license in ArcGIS to build the dashboard.
In the workshop I recommend to keep in mind your higher goals--what are you trying to communicate, who is your audience, and use those goals and your audience to select the most appropriate tools to use for communication--story map, Experience Builder, dashboard, or something else?
This workshop's slides also include a rich body of resources for you to continue your learning, such as videos, lessons, documentation, tips, an Esri MOOC, and educational tips such as how to modify an existing dashboard with a short URL adjustment.
Why use dashboards in instruction? In short, students who understand how to think spatially and use GIS can be a powerful and positive force in your university, in their future workplace, and in the global economy. Empowered with employees who use GIS, workplaces will become vibrant and efficient, enabling a prosperous economy and sustainable environment for all.