Sometimes Change Brings Innovation: GIS Programs in Higher Education
A continued state of change
From their inception, educational institutions have always been in a state of change. From the founding of what are widely considered to be the oldest universities in the world, the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859, and the University of Bologna, founded in 1088 in Bologna, Italy, and the University of Oxford (1249 to 1264)(which I finally visited this year!), to the thousands of institutions in existence today, universities have always been responsively reinventing themselves to best serve the needs of their students and the needs of the greater society. Today, community colleges, technical colleges, tribal colleges, and universities must grapple with societal, educational, financial, and technological forces that are changing more rapidly with each passing year, particularly in the geo/enviro/geotechnology sphere. How can faculty, administrators, researchers, and facilities managers understand and respond to these changes so that their institutions will be relevant and vibrant for decades to come?
My colleagues and I on the education team greatly value the work we are privileged to be involved in with the education community. This work occurs at all levels, from primary to university level, all around the world, and across multiple disciplines from anthropology to zoology and just about everything in between. We do this through making sure that GIS software is inexpensive or free, that tools are widely available, that spatial data is accessible, so that faculty and students can be successful. We do this through a variety of means, including the provision of curricular resources, through technical and pedagogical assistance, through highlighting success stories in Esri and other publications, through face-to-face and online webinars, presentations, and workshops, through networking opportunities for the community, and in other ways. We also do a lot of listening to the community's challenges and concerns.
One Challenge
One challenge facing higher education that we hear from faculty and read about in articles that is perhaps more acute now than a generation ago, or even a few years ago, is the stagnation or decline of some longstanding GIS programs. This situation includes the geography programs where some GIS programs are housed. Certainly, many others are growing and thriving. However, I wish to respond here to what some of our educational colleagues have been asking me to write about, which is why this is happening, and if I have any advice moving forward.
Selected reasons for the challenge
Over the past 3 years alone, I have visited 110 campuses face to face and have, along with my colleagues here at Esri, conducted hundreds more online short courses, presentations, and workshops. Therefore, I am no educational expert, but I have amassed, thanks to conversations with you, the education community, a deep and broad understanding of the reality of the culture and institutions of teaching and learning. I believe that the stagnation and decline of some programs is due to a variety of factors:
1. In the past, institutions of higher education represented the only major way, other than on-the-job training, that people could learn GIS. While one can argue that many people in the past learned GIS "on their own" apart from in higher education or apart from on the job, the point is that many ways exist today to learn GIS tools and methods. These include thousands of videos, dozens of Esri and university MOOCs, thousands of self paced lessons, certificates in a wide variety of forms and styles, hundreds if not thousands of face-to-face and online college and university programs that one can choose from, and other ways. Certainly the rise of online programs is another factor competing with your specific institution: A student can enroll in and take courses from many rigorous, well-respected programs, offered from a university that could be halfway around the world from their own location and not requiring them to enroll in your college or university. Thus, there are more options available to everyone.
2. GIS software is easier to use nowadays than ever before. Certainly the world is a complex, dynamic planet, with 8 billion humans impacting it, and therefore, GIS tools, which were created to model and understand that world, are by their nature going to be numerous and complex. That said, though, learning GIS is vastly more accessible than it was a few years ago. Its evolution into a cloud-based environment and ecosystem nature mean that people can learn specific components of it, rather than the entire platform. They can do so with contextual menus and wizard-driven, AI-enabled tools that are more intuitive now than ever before. In addition, they can access imagery and vector data sets as data services, and even collect their own data via field surveys, UAVs, and heads-up digitizing.
3. "Traditional college demographics" in many parts of the world have changed: In certain regions, there are fewer people in their late teens and early 20s; ages which traditionally have been a key audience for college and university enrollment. That said, many institutes of higher education attract those who are mid-career or even late-career, and my view is that it is never too late to get into GIS.
4. There is some GIS saturation in the market, where many government agencies, nonprofits, and industries have a stable GIS-savvy workforce.
5. Sixty years after its creation, GIS is not seen by some as new or cutting edge any longer. In my opinion, however, today is the most exciting time to get into GIS--with the advent of web mapping applications, a wide variety of problems to solve from the global to local scale, and AI-driven workflows, just to name a few.
6. In some parts of the world and in some regions, changes in the economy and in the unemployment rate affect some college enrollment. Traditionally, when economies are doing well, technical college enrollment declines as those segments in the population are already gainfully employed.
7. There is a continued lack of awareness of geospatial technology as a viable career path. It's still rather "hidden", isn't it? Similar to an elevator where you get in, punch buttons, expect something to happen, and you don't think much about the technology behind it. GIS is behind the scenes, like an elevator: GIS powers the electricity you use, your ride share and fitness app, your package delivery, how and what you ate yesterday, supply chains that resulted in the phone you are holding and the clothes you are wearing, managing the bus you will take tomorrow morning, and much more.
8. A related concern voiced to me by faculty is when students don't find out about GIS until halfway through their undergraduate career, posing challenges to the student in terms of time to invest and their own finances. What if we worked on raising awareness about GIS earlier, before students even arrive on campus? My colleagues and I through our active K-12 program, in collaboration with many of you reading this, and other geomentors, are doing all we can to support and promote spatial thinking throughout all of education and society. It is our hope that one result of these efforts will be that more students entering higher education will already know about GIS and want to pursue it on your campus. Others I know on campuses promote GIS through "GIS Day" events, campus sustainability events, through their library, or other means.
9. Perhaps the lack of awareness stems in part from the relatively few jobs naming GIS in the job title. In my career, for example, I have been cartographer, geographer, adjunct faculty, and education manager: I have not had "GIS" in my job title, and the same is true for many in the profession. That is actually a good thing, for it shows that GIS is increasingly a tool and a perspective that someone with a job title of wildlife biologist, city planner, supply chain manager, or health analyst value. Indeed, I am seeing that GIS skills are more in demand than ever before. But admittedly this contributes to the lack of visibility for GIS.
10. On a related note about the lack of awareness, many GIS programs are housed in geography departments: Geography as a discipline has always been rather misunderstood, which doesn't help the misunderstood nature of GIS any! Some have told me repeatedly in the past that "geography missed the boat on spatial analysis years ago by not fully embracing it". I don't want to get into a "how to save geography" discussion here, but :
(1) As a geographer, I certainly want my home discipline to thrive and be healthy. And no, I don't want GIS to be renamed to remove the "geographic" name (though I also like spatial data science as a name) because to me the geographic is fundamental to its approach to problem solving: It is much more than "using maps in analysis".
(2) I feel it will benefit geography as a discipline by demonstrating to other disciplines across campus that geographic thinking is more important now than ever before, and that the "whys of where", which many disciplines want to teach, is a set of perspectives, tools, and ways of thinking that geographers can take a leadership role in on their campuses.
(3) More people will be getting into the field of geotechnologies from outside geography, as part of the widening recognition that "why where matters", the spread of GIS into other IT tools and organizational workflows, and the advent of GIS to the web and requiring people with IT and coding backgrounds. I regularly teach GIS workshops where I ask for a show of hands indicating how many participants came from a geography undergraduate or graduate school background, and the percent of attendees at these workshops indicating this background has been declining for many years. However, I believe that this widening diversity of backgrounds will strengthen the use of GIS across education and society, and again provide those with deep knowledge about GIScience the platform to help others--those who don't have time to take GIS courses, but want to use the tools. Those GIS folks with a deep background can help these other folks to thoughtfully consider the choices they must make about database design, projections, symbology, classification, analysis tools, and how to most effectively communicate with GIS tools such as web mapping applications just to name a few ways they can assist.
GIS is a disruptor!
In education, GIS has always been a disruptive, barrier-breaking way of thinking and toolset. This makes it extremely valuable for encouraging critical and holistic thinking, but also sometimes presents a challenge to GIS. Why? Because GIS does not have one standard "home" in the curriculum, in departments, or in institutions. It can be effectively housed in many different programs and schools and can even be called different things (location analytics, geomatics, geotechnologies, geomedia, GI systems, GI science, and by other names).
Saluting the faculty
In short, none of the stagnation and decline that is occurring in some institutions has to do with faculty not being innovative or forward-thinking. To the contrary, the faculty I have been working with in the geotechnology space over my career have been some of the most creative people I have ever met. I salute you all! You are making a positive difference; you are leaders; you are helping students to become positive change agents in their future workplace and in society. With the challenges come great opportunities for us and you to show leadership of why this all matters, now more than ever before, given the challenges we face in the world.
Selected advice and food for thought
I have been asked to provide some advice on these important matters. For starters, I offer this below, but largely rely on you, the community to share your wisdom in the comments section. You are the real experts here: While I have served as adjunct faculty in community and tribal colleges and in universities for almost 30 years, I have never been a full-time academic and thus defer to the advice of the community. However, I will share the following.
1. Competition and reinvention. While deep down I want all programs to thrive and grow, I'm a realist: Like much else in society, education is a competitive environment affected by larger forces. I am also, though, a firm believer in the fact that some chaos and turmoil can spark innovation and positive change. Some departments have effectively re-branded, some have merged with others on campus, and some initiatives on campus are not even a traditional department of program (such as 10 Across at Arizona State University). Some course titles have changed, such as the Digital Earth course I have co-created at the University of Denver, and the Beautiful Maps course at Jacksonville University. The University of Wyoming is more effectively able to infuse enterprise, coding, and development instruction after their GIS program became part of computer science. I advise some regional universities to focus their GIS programs on water, energy, business, or some other area in such a way as to not directly compete as just a smaller version of their big state university, but rather, to fill a unique set of needs. In some universities, such as the University of North Carolina Charlotte, GIS is increasingly seen as key to an emerging Data Science program. GIS can serve as a key component in what some universities are pursuing in the social implications of technology, such as the ATLAS institute at the University of Colorado. You can read more about innovations in GIS education in this education blog space and in other Esri blogs and publications. I think the days of a university or college saying "we've existed for 150 years and we will be around for another 150 years" and coasting on past laurels are over: Innovation must happen for those institutions to continue into the future.
2. Promoting geospatial technology and spatial thinking in multiple disciplines. I believe that the best way to increase the use of GIS is not necessarily to spend all of our energy to "save" programs that are struggling, but rather to embed GIS and spatial thinking into mathematics, economics, business, earth and biological science, geography, data science, communication and media, sociology, humanities, civil engineering, planning, design, and other departments on campus. This is increasingly happening across many campuses, large and small, throughout the world, as I detailed here in a Fine Arts department on a campus and was our goal in writing a Teaching Mathematics with Interactive Mapping book. Part of the challenge, though, is that most campuses are still funded and staffed on a model that is contrary to the interdisciplinary nature of GIS.
3. Articulate the value. Be always ready to articulate the value that spatial, holistic, and critical thinking through the application of GIS to solve problems can bring to energy, water, hazards, population, land use, health, transportation, and many other areas in society, including all the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including the value it brings to your own institution. GIS is valuable in teaching, in research, and also in campus administration, helping the campus to attract and recruit new students, be a safer place to work and to learn, saving campus energy cost, and in many other ways. Regularly share these messages with deans, provosts, university presidents, campus safety officers, students, and colleagues of yours in other disciplines.
Sharing the above items is not meant to mitigate some of the real pain that is happening in higher education, where layoffs, closures, and funding cuts are the reality that many colleagues are facing, but my intention is to provide some hope and encouragement.
Again I certainly don't have all the answers, therefore I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this subject.
