Latest Contributions by AdenaSchutzberg1

[Originally published in Esri Insider, June 22, 2015] By Jim Baumann Looking into the Future                              David DiBiase is Director of Esri’s Education Outreach team and former Director of the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Pennsylvania State University. I recently had the opportunity to chat with David about the importance of offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as part of Esri’s well-established education program. In the third and final part of our discussion, David talks about the future of the MOOC program at Esri. [Read the first and second parts of our discussion.] Baumann: What’s in the future for MOOCs at Esri? DiBiase: Many students express excitement about the capabilities of ArcGIS Online, and appreciation to Esri for offering the course. Many are experienced ArcGIS users. Many others are new to Esri. The company is pleased with the response. We plan to offer Going Places with Spatial Analysis two or three times in 2015, depending on demand. By summarizing data in different ways you can reveal patterns, answers questions and support further analysis. We’ve also designed a second MOOC. Course design begins with a target audience, which in this case is current students and recent graduates of business schools, both bachelor’s and MBAs. We assembled a team of Esri people with recent business degrees to advise us, and we have a small group of GIS-savvy B-school faculty members who are eager to help. We want to help folks coming out of B-schools see how location analytics can give them a competitive edge in a tough job market. We’ve titled the MOOC The Location Advantage. We offered it for the first time in May and it is now in progress. Based on the reception of Going Places with Spatial Analysis within and beyond the company, I expect Esri will develop a suite of MOOCs to help expose our technology and outlook beyond our existing user base. We’re already discussing the possibility of a third MOOC to be developed in late 2015, but we haven’t settled on an audience or topic yet. Meanwhile, we’re mindful that free, large-scale online courses are expensive to build, maintain, promote, and run. Whether Esri will be able to sustain this effort remains to be seen. But I like to think that if we continue to attract both the large numbers of enrollees and positive reviews, we’ll be able to grow our MOOC portfolio in years to come. Creating density surfaces can simplify complex data and bring new insights to support decision making. Baumann: What sort of educational opportunities are available from Esri for those students that have taken the MOOC and want to continue learning GIS? DiBiase: We define success in part by the number of MOOC students who seek to learn more about GIS and Esri. At the conclusion of each MOOC offering we suggest a number of next steps. Students can seek out further training opportunities provided by Esri’s Training Services group (training.esri.com), including self-paced web courses and seminars. They may also move on to Learn GIS (learn.arcgis.com), Esri’s newest education destination, where they can join an ArcGIS Online organization for free and access additional case-based self-study exercises. We also encourage students to check out Esri’s ArcGIS for Home Use license, which enables anyone to run ArcGIS for Desktop on their personal computer for noncommercial use. The Home Use license also includes an ArcGIS Online subscription account. Finally, we’re happy to discuss formal education opportunities at leading institutions, both online and on campus. Baumann:  How important do you believe MOOCS are in educating people about the power of GIS? DiBiase:  Back in 2003, the US Department of Labor identified “geospatial technology” as a high growth tech industry, along with biotech and nanotech. At the same time, however, they pointed out that awareness of the industry remained low. We’re still struggling to achieve mainstream awareness of our technology and our field. MOOCs may be helping. Esri has a loyal and energetic following among its customers and friends. You can think of that as a kind of constellation of individuals and organizations that orbit Esri. However, business-to-business companies like Esri struggle mightily to reach people beyond their orbit. Students explore population exposures: locating the nearest monitoring stations or, finding the predicted exposure. Our goal is to reach people who may not know what GIS is or haven’t heard of Esri. In the context of higher education, we want to reach beyond the traditional map-conscious disciplines like geography to others such as health, business, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities. Attracting the interest and participation of these disciplines has always been a challenge for my team. I personally am not aware of any strategy for broadening our reach beyond our own constellation than MOOCs, because MOOCs are an opportunity for people to exercise their curiosity and expand their horizons. MOOCS are a low-cost, low-risk means to explore things about the world that you might not encounter otherwise. I think there are a lot more people who would be interested in GIS if we expose it in a way that is not only challenging, but also supportive and fun, and that’s what we try to do with these MOOCs. I believe this is one of the best strategies we have for helping the wider world understand the power of the geographic perspective and the effectiveness of geospatial technologies to bring geography to life. Time will tell if that hunch is right, but from this early vantage point I’m optimistic. About Jim Baumann Jim Baumann is a longtime employee at Esri. He has written articles on GIS technology and the computer graphics industry for more than 30 years. ... View more

[Originally published in Esri Insider, June 15, 2015] By Jim Baumann Developing Support for the Program          David DiBiase is Director of Esri’s Education Outreach team and former Director of the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Pennsylvania State University. I recently had the opportunity to chat with David about the importance of offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as part of Esri’s well-established education program. In part II of our discussion, David talks about developing support for the program. [You can read the first part of our discussion here.] Baumann: Did you have any difficulty getting the project approved and pulling together the Esri team to create and manage the MOOC? DiBiase: No, it was really just a matter of timing. I met with Esri president Jack Dangermond and Education Services division director Nick Frunzi early in 2014. I presented the idea that we could create a free online course that would enable thousands of learners to “test-drive” the spatial analysis tools in ArcGIS Online. They agreed to support it on the spot. David DiBiase and Linda Beale are faculty members for Esri’s “Going Places with Spatial Analysis” MOOC. We went right to work and built a fabulous team. Our “MOOC team” includes members of my own Education Outreach group in Marketing, the Training Services group in Education Services, and Geoprocessing team members from our Products division. In addition, a number of employees from across the company have stepped up to volunteer as teaching assistants who answer questions and give advice to our online students. It’s really been a great collaborative effort. Baumann: Why did you decide to offer an intermediate level MOOC on GIS, rather than an introductory class? DiBiase: We want to create large-scale online courses that complement offerings by colleges and universities, not compete with them. Providing no-cost access to the analytic capabilities of ArcGIS Online is not something that a higher education institution can do without our help. Our hope is that educators will use our non-credit MOOCs as assignments or supplementary activities in their own for-credit courses. We also provide technology and staff support to institutions that request it for their own MOOCs. Whether it’s ours or an education partner’s MOOC, the key is to reach a mass audience that is, to some extent, new to GIS. In the “Going Places with Spatial Analysis” MOOC, each week students have the opportunity to explore problems through spatial analysis using ArcGIS Online. Baumann: What were the results of your initial offering of the MOOC? DiBiase: Our pilot offering of Going Places with Spatial Analysis opened in September 2014. It’s a six-week online course that includes free access to ArcGIS Online. We chose to limit enrollment for the first offering because everything about the course was new. So, we invited the first 1,200 students who expressed interest in participating. We offered the course again this March and the registration was nearly 22,000, so the program is building. —– In Part III of our discussion, David talks about the future of the MOOC program at Esri. About Jim Baumann Jim Baumann is a longtime employee at Esri. He has written articles on GIS technology and the computer graphics industry for more than 30 years. ... View more

[Originally published in Esri Insider, June 8, 2015] By Jim Baumann Recognizing the Potential for Implementing a MOOC Program at Esri David DiBiase is Director of Esri’s Education Outreach team and former Director of the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute at Pennsylvania State University. I recently had the opportunity to chat with David about the importance of offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as part of Esri’s well-established education program. In part I of our discussion, David talks about first recognizing the potential for implementing a MOOC program at Esri. Baumann: You recently introduced MOOCs to Esri’s education program. Tell me how this came about. DiBiase: Well, it wasn’t just me. I had the idea, but nothing would have come of it without the cooperation of leaders and staff members across the company. We’ve followed the lead of several higher education institutions that introduced MOOCs about maps and GIS. The largest of those so far is “Maps and the Geospatial Revolution” offered by Penn State through Coursera. Students in that MOOC indicated that they wanted to learn more about this subject, and that spatial analysis was the topic they most wanted to explore. The primary audience we had in mind was tech-savvy young professionals who are familiar with data analysis and want to learn more about the special capabilities of spatial data analysis. David DiBiase. I joined Esri three years ago as leader of the Education Outreach team. The strategy I proposed for higher education was to complement our long-time efforts to support educators with new kinds of support provided directly to students. I believed then and still believe now that we need to spark a grass roots interest in and demand for not just our technologies, but for the fundamental geographic approach that our technologies bring to life. When I arrived at Esri in 2011, it wasn’t clear how we could do that. Then MOOCs came along in 2012 and revealed a global mass market for free online education. This phenomenon provided the channel we needed to reach learners beyond the disciplines that traditionally include mapping and GIS in their curricula. I had a lot of experience in online teaching and learning from my years at Penn State, and Esri too had experience with web courses since the 1990s, so MOOCs seemed like a natural next step. Baumann: How did you determine that a MOOC would fit into Esri’s existing education program? DiBiase: Esri’s education enterprise is diverse, and is spread across the entire company. For the most part, however, our education offerings serve people who already use our technology. What’s new about MOOCs is that they provide a way to engage with people who are curious about the power of spatial thinking and geospatial technologies, but who may not be GIS users or even have heard of Esri. Most higher education institutions use our ArcGIS platform to some extent. In fact, 70 percent of the top 400 universities in the world (as ranked by the Times of London) maintain Esri education site licenses. However, in many institutions, GIS is concentrated in a few academic departments and administrative units. Most college students never encounter GIS during their prescribed courses of study. My team has struggled for years to encourage adoption of the geographic approach across the college curriculum. MOOCs provide a way to engage thousands of current students and recent graduates across a broad spectrum of disciplines who seek a competitive edge in the job market, or who are simply curious about the technology. This is a new channel for Esri. —– In Part II of our interview, David discusses how he developed the support he needed to implement the MOOC program at Esri. In Part III, he talks about the future of the MOOC program at Esri. About Jim Baumann Jim Baumann is a longtime employee at Esri. He has written articles on GIS technology and the computer graphics industry for more than 30 years. ... View more

Event details: What: Join instructor John Shramek, course host Linda Peters and Education Manager Joseph J. Kerski, Ph.D., GISP for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) live on the GeoNet Community in the Location Advantage MOOC group. Ask the panelists anything about the topics covered in the course and any fun, interesting and thought-provoking questions.  When: The AMA event will take place in this discussion thread (right on this page!) on Thursday November 30 , 2017 from 12:30pm-1:30pm PT.   How to participate: During the AMA, if you are logged into GeoNet (here's how to log in with your Esri credentials), you can post your questions in the comments below and the panelists will reply to your questions in the comments.  You're welcome to post questions ahead of the AMA but we won't begin answering them until the AMA begins on November 30th at 12:30pm PT.   Reminder: AMA Tips and GeoNet Community Guidelines You will need a GeoNet account (uses Esri credentials) in order to ask questions. If you do not yet have Esri credentials, get them right away; it can take a day or two to process the request. When asking questions and making comments during the AMA, remember to follow the GeoNet Community Guiding Principles. During the AMA this discussion page will not auto-refresh, so please remember to refresh this page to see new questions, comments and replies.   You'll know the AMA is live when you see a picture below with John, Linda and Joseph. From there on, remember to refresh the page to see our updates and new questions and comments.  Thanks for joining us and we'll see you on Thursday!   12:30 pm - And we're live! Go ahead and ask your questions! 1:00 pm - We're halfway through, Great questions! Keep them coming! 1:25 pm - Five minutes to go! Got any fun questions for Joseph or John? 1:30 pm - Overtime! We'll take your questions too during this bonus 10 minutes!  1:40 pm  - And that's a wrap! The live AMA has ended but Joseph, Linda and John will continue to answer questions as schedules allow. Thanks for joining us and asking great questions!      ... View more

Background If you have a current installation of ArcGIS Pro and it has a Single User or Concurrent License, you will need to change your license to a Named User license, the kind used in this course. The course license includes access to software extensions and ArcGIS Online credits. Both of these are needed to complete the course exercises. You will be able to return to your existing license whenever you like. Remember that the ArcGIS Pro license Esri provides for this course and the associated privileges will be revoked after the last day of the course. Determining your License Type In Section 1 Exercise 2 we asked you to determine your license type by clicking on the Licensing option on the left side of the Project window. The graphic below shows a Named User License. If you see anything else in that top line, you'll need to change your license type. Changing your License Type If you see either Single Use License or Concurrent User License in your Licensing tab, you'll need to change your license type to a Named User License to use the license we provide for ArcGIS Pro for this course.  To change to a Named User License, scroll down in the ArcGIS Pro Licensing panel and click the Configure your licensing options button. (The graphic below is "the bottom" of the one above.) The Licensing dialog box will show your current licensing information. You might want to take a screen capture of the current settings and save it for reference for when you are ready to change the license type back. You may also want to contact your Esri software admin or your IT department if you are unsure about making this change on your own. When you are ready to make the change, in the Configure Authorization section (top) choose the License Type "Named User License" from the drop down menu. In the Configure your licensing options section (bottom) make sure the radio button for ArcGIS Online is selected and that https://www.arcgis.com is set as the URL for the licensing portal. Click OK. Now your installation of ArcGIS Pro is set to use a Named User License. This is a good time to close ArcGIS Pro and restart it. Now you can sign in to ArcGIS Pro with with your course ArcGIS credentials described in Section 1 Exercise 1. Changing your License Type Back To return to your Single Use License or Concurrent Use License repeat these steps to reset the license type back from a Named User License using your screen captured settings for reference. Once the license type is set back to its original state, close ArcGIS Pro and restart it, then you can log in with your existing (non-course) ArcGIS Pro credentials. ... View more

1. Register before the course begins. If at all possible, register well before the start date of an Esri massive open online course (MOOC). If you register after the course begins (registration remains open during the first week or two of the course), there will be a slight delay (no more than 48 hours but usually less) before you can access the course software. Register for a MOOC on the course page at Esri Academy.    2. Verify that your ArcGIS account (the one you used to register) has an up-to-date email address. If your email address is out of date, we have no way to confirm your registration or remind you when the course starts. Here's how to update your email address: If you have an ArcGIS public account, visit https://my.esri.com and log in. Click the My Profile tab and review your information. Use the pencil icon next to your primary email address to edit it. Don't forget to click Update to save your changes.   If you have an ArcGIS Online organizational account, from an organization such as work or school, it’s likely your email address is up-to-date. If it’s not, you may need to contact your ArcGIS Online organization’s administrator to change it. 3. Add the course dates to your calendar. After registering for a MOOC, add the course start and end dates to your personal calendar. We send email reminders when the course starts and during the course, but sometimes emails get lost (see #2 above!), so we encourage you to set your own reminder. When the course begins, review the Dates to Remember panel on the course Dashboard. It includes details, to the minute(!), when the course will close and software will no longer be available. We are unable to provide certificates to students after a MOOC closes. Please plan ahead! 4. Confirm that your hardware and operating system meet course requirements. Different MOOCs have different hardware and software requirements. The details are in the Software section at the bottom of each course description page. MOOC software section example 5. Start during the first week. We encourage you to start the course the week it opens. Take the time to complete the first section during the first week of the course and plan to set aside time each week to work on the new content. It's our experience that students who start the course and complete the assignments week by week get more out of the course and are more likely to complete it than those who try to complete all the assignments in just a week or two. 6. Understand how Esri MOOCs work.  Esri MOOCs are different than Esri e-Learning courses. Here are some of the key differences. A MOOC: Runs for 4-6 weeks, with defined start and end dates. Includes free access to licenses for the Esri software needed to complete course exercises. Includes multiple sections, with a new section opening each week. Is led by a host and includes discussion forums that are supported by Esri staff. Includes videos, hands-on exercises, quizzes, and other learning opportunities. 7. Prepare to read exercise PDFs and use the software at the same time.  Hands-on exercises are provided in PDFs. For the best experience, download the PDFs and view them using a PDF reader outside the course web page. There are a few ways to follow the exercises while working with software:  If you have two monitors, you can read the PDF on one monitor and work with the Esri software on the other. If you don't have two monitors, you can read the PDF from your phone (or another device such as a tablet) and work with the Esri software on the computer.  If you have only one monitor but don't have a phone or tablet, you can print out the PDF file and read along as you work with the Esri software on the computer. 8. Read the forum posts and announcements. Your fellow learners, host, and Esri staffers will communicate with you in the course forum. This is a great place to ask questions and help out others. Instructors also communicate with you via announcements inside the course. Announcements may provide you with guidance about a specific exercise or warn you of a deadline. Be sure to read them! 9. Know how to get help. For help with general questions before the course begins: Visit the Common Questions page for MOOCs. Use the form at the bottom of that page for other questions. Please include the name of the course in the message body.  For help with course exercises after the course begins:  You'll find details on the Help tab in the course. We encourage MOOC students to learn how to learn, so expect instructors to guide you to see how far you can get on your own. 10. Prepare for the end of class.  Esri MOOCs run for four or six weeks. Please see the Dates to Remember section in the course Dashboard for the date and time the course closes. After the date and time noted: Your course ArcGIS account, associated software licenses like those for ArcGIS Pro, and the course content (videos, quizzes, etc.) will no longer be accessible. Your content stored in your course ArcGIS Online account, if any, will be deleted. Two topics come up towards the end of every MOOC: (1) certificates and (2) saving course maps and projects. Certificates You will receive a certificate of completion (a PDF) if you have completed each lesson in each section of the course before it closes. If your goal is to earn a certificate, be sure to have the certificate in hand well before the course closes. We are unable to provide certificates to students who do not complete a course before it closes. That said, you are always welcome to take the course again to earn the certificate. You will know you have completed each and every lesson and have access to your certificate when: Each lesson has a green check mark beside it. Each green bar (representing a section) is filled in showing 100% completion. A message appears at the top of the course page like this: After the course closes, you can access the certificate via your My Learning Activity page. Saving Course Maps and Projects This post from John Shramek details options for saving work completed in a course ArcGIS Online account. ... View more