Showcasing your campus using Story Maps
Story maps can serve a wide variety of purposes, one of which is to provide an easy-to-create, engaging way of showcasing your campus in an interactive tour. Such maps can help new students and faculty get oriented, can serve as ways that prospective students and employees can tour the campus from faraway places and then when they arrive on site, can serve as ways for you to showcase innovative programs and people on campus, and much more. These maps can be shared with and worked on with the campus visual communciations and recuitment programs and could serve to attract people to your campus. These maps can also be made for primary and secondary schools as a way of helping students think about and take care of their school grounds, to think spatially, and use technology in meaningful ways. It can give them a sense of pride to be authors of their campus maps!
When I arrive on a university or community or tribal college campus to conduct a series of invited workshops or presentations, I often create a story map or web map on my way to the buildings in which I am speaking. I use photos and videos I take on my phone with the location services "on" so they can be easily geotagged and included in popups. I have compiled some of these maps into a gallery shown here. These should be considereed "introductory" story maps because the purpose of these maps are to help my audiences realize that these web maps can be created in very little time and yet can tell a compelling story. Because I want to demonstrate that each took me just 15 to 30 minutes to create, I resist the temptation to edit them later and improve their cartography or content. It is my hope that in so doing, those I show these maps to when I am on those campuses can think of the issues or themes that they would like to gather data on, to map, and to study. You can learn how to create a gallery of your own maps here like the one I created or you can create a story map collection.
I created the above gallery using the classic story maps templates. But the ArcGIS story maps give you even more capabilities in an even easier to use single template of tools. Here is an example set of story maps of campuses:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/c66f04f1b1584a04b1650e4076232ff6
As you can see in this collection, campus story maps can be focused on a specific theme, such as historical buildings and events, sustainability, art, diversity, and much more.
Even more powerful than the tools themselves is the practice of teaching with elements of the ArcGIS platform including story maps. When students work with these mapping tools, they consider a theme, problem, or issue they want to investigate, they work with a wide variety of data, they develop GIS skills such as symbology and classification, they think about how to communicate that data effectively. You can use Survey123, for example, to set up a crowdsourced survey to involve hundreds of people walking around on campus collecting data on specific themes. The data that those people collect could feed the resulting story map, which then dynamically reflects your campus community's input. In the above set is one of my favorite maps, in part because I teach frequently at the University of Colorado, and also because I love trees and have always considered creating tree inventories as a noble endeavor:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/c66f04f1b1584a04b1650e4076232ff6?item=3
Digging Deeper. You can do even more than create story maps -- you could integrate your campus mapping efforts with the facility management teams on your campus so they can be leveraged for campus safety, infrastructure mapping, managing events such as concerts and football games, and much more. In addition, you can contribute some of that data to the topographic basemap in ArcGIS Online, via the Esri Campus Mapping Program.
For some excellent examples, investigate the following campus maps from Stanford, Clemson, Harvard, Univeristy of Texas at Austin, Northwest Missouri State, Ohio State, and UNC Chapel Hill. Some of these include an entire set of themes, some include 3D, some include indoor spaces, and others incoporate other features that should provide many ideas and inspiration.
Part of the 3D maps at Harvard University.
Give these techniques a try and I look forward to your comments.