CD-ROMs, Land-lines, and ArcMap: Updating course material
Authors: @JosephKerski, @CanserinaKurnia, @BrianBaldwin
Evolutions in technology give us time to reflect and reconsider—what lessons should I retain? What content should I delete? What have I always wanted to include? It’s an appropriate time to think about your program, course, and unit goals—what do you actually want to accomplish?
When you are getting ready to move to a new city, do you pack up your old broken blender? Do you bring the CD-ROM full of Census data from 1998? Over the years, your needs have changed… and so have your students. While it rings true for a move to a new house or apartment, it’s the same for GIS!
With the impending retirement of ArcMap – it’s an opportunity to look at your ‘move’ as not just a migration to ArcGIS Pro, but a shift to a new modality of teaching GIS. A GIS that shifts from a disconnected desktop to a cloud-based platform that includes web applications, web services, mobile tools, real-time data, AI, hosted imagery, scripting, coding, etc. To return to our moving analogy for a minute… are you still going to sign up for a land line at your new apartment?
Considering the main tool for introductory courses
Building on the above modality shift, we want to make the case that ArcGIS Online, and its associated Instant Apps, data services, StoryMaps, mapping, and spatial analysis capabilities make it quite suitable for an introductory course in GIS. We the authors of this essay have done this in our own courses and so have many professors in universities, and in community, technical, and tribal colleges.
In fact, with the recent migration of raster analysis and additional vector analysis tools, even the second course in GIS can also be wholly taught using ArcGIS Online. By encouraging students to use web-based applications or StoryMaps during face-to-face courses, in videos, or during discussions in online courses, they can help serve as assessment tools for faculty. Equally as important, with fewer tools than in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online allows students to easily grasp the capabilities of these tools and get excited about the possibilities that GIS holds for their own futures, without a steep learning curve.
Furthermore, there are fewer technology challenges with ArcGIS Online, especially important to students who are new to GIS. Students can run a web browser on any device, with nothing to install, and no virtualization tools to run. Current events such as wildfires or flooding can be easily added as real-time layers. One benefit of the hosted nature of ArcGIS Online, is that assignments and modules can be embedded easily into Learning Management Systems. ArcGIS Online is also the perfect tool for your colleagues in other disciplines (sociology, history, biology, mathematics, and others) to introduce spatial perspective in their own courses.
Use Available Lessons & Labs
Many of us became instructors because we enjoy creating and customizing curriculum for specific courses and programs. If you are keen on migrating some of your existing ArcMap lessons to ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and other tools, we (authors of this essay) have done it and so can you – we will support you.
However, as an instructor, you have a choice of either creating your own lessons or using existing ones. There is no shortage of existing lessons, ranging from the ArcGIS Learn library and Esri Virtual Academy to shared higher education resources (such as GeoTech Center and iGETT), Esri and university MOOCs, and many others. The point is: you don’t need to create everything yourself. Think about the best way to spend your time – some weeks, it might be better spent on the reflections and discussions that you add to a course rather than spending 20 hours developing a lesson, 95% of the contents of which is already created and curated by Esri or another library. There is no shame in using a lesson that someone else created in sections of your courses or programs.
How can I keep up when the technology changes so quickly?
This is a sentiment we hear all of the time – and many of us feel the same way. Rather than fight an uphill battle against the tide of technology, you need to move with the current. If the topic is real-time data, or mobile tools, Esri is constantly building out lessons and resources that can be used as introductory material. These provide ‘step by step’ instructions to get students familiar with the technology – the benefit being that you don’t need to create screenshots or build guides. And in the future, these lessons will be updated, which can free your time to improve other components of your courses and programs.
If you screen to excess and make your lessons consequently long, you will remain in a continuous cycle of having to update and curate your lessons. Please, don’t do this! Rather, spend less time updating curriculum, and use that new-found time to create new curricular ideas, teaching techniques, and furthering your own research.
Close
The significant changes in GIS honestly provide an opportunity to re-think and re-imagine the goals and purpose of your courses. Yes, the times… they are a changing, but you aren’t on your own. There are a wide array of lessons, resources, guides, and tutorials available that cover many of these new topics. Others have already done it and we are here to help as well. While it might be bittersweet to leave the rotary phone behind in your old apartment, I promise you, your new place has great WIFI.