Latest Contributions by GeriMiller

Amidst COVID-19 closures, many educators have sought to virtualize ArcGIS to support their courses. One of the ways is to leverage the AWS Educate Program, which provides EC2 instances (virtual computers), among other AWS services, as well as enhances student’s knowledge of cloud environments in general. Given recent experiences shared by a couple of educators, we wanted to take the opportunity to share lessons learned and provide further guidance in terms of running ArcGIS on EC2. With the AWS Educate Program, there is a an option for a AWS Educate Starter Account, and "regular" AWS Account. The AWS Educate Starter Account does not support access to AWS Marketplace for EC2, which means that access to preconfigured Marketplace AMIs will not be available. Esri does provide preconfigured AMIs on the AWS Marketplace, which come with pre-installed ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcMap (not ArcGIS Pro), and hence are not available with a Starter Account. Starter Account No credit card required sign-up Eligible for free credits through AWS Educate No access to Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise AMIs in Marketplace; have to share your own custom AMI to students, or have students install ArcGIS on their own. Regular Account Credit card required for sign-up Eligible for free credits through Educate Access to Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise AMIs in Marketplace; can share your own custom AMI to students, or have students install ArcGIS on their own. The ArcGIS Enterprise AMIs are a wonderful way to start but are highly customized and have a large footprint/overhead. Unless you are teaching ArcGIS Enterprise in your course, if your intent is to just provide access to ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap, the recommendation is to create your own custom AMI, and share that with your students.  Alternatively, have your students start from an appropriate base Windows AMI and install ArcGIS on their own.   Advantage of creating one’s own AMI, then making it available to the whole class is that you can also include other helpful tools in your own image (7-zip, Notepad++, Chrome, Atom, PyCharm, etc.).  When this approach is taken, you would need to ask the students to send their AWS account IDs, then share the AMI with those IDs (i.e. an additional step). In terms of covering any outstanding costs, AWS has provided codes that could be distributed to students and redeemed for AWS credits, so consider reaching out to AWS directly.   Also, it should be mentioned that, yet another approach is to have an AWS centralized account for the class/department, and instructor or staff spins the instances for the students, using a similar pre-configured AMI approach. The advantage of a centralized account is that the students do not need individual AWS accounts (i.e. lesser amount of steps), which has worked well for some institutions. However, there are associated costs, though AWS could also provide codes/credits for educational purposes to cover the costs. Feel free to review the following webinar on “Enabling Remote Access and Virtualizing ArcGIS”, outlining additional virtualization options. If you are considering Azure as an environment, the videos below from our colleagues from Esri Canada will be very helpful.       ArcGIS Desktop Azure VMs, Sizing, Cost and Sample Templates       How to Launch pre-configured ArcGIS Desktop virtual machines in Azure Thank you to Peter Knoop, University of Michigan, and James Detwiler, Penn State, for sharing their experiences above. ... View more

As part of our continued efforts to support students and educators amidst COVID-19 university closures, we will offer free Student licensing until August 31 st , 2020 – via Learn ArcGIS.  The following Press Release was published, feel free to share widely - Esri Offers Students Free Access to Software for Continued Education through Coronavirus Closures. In essence, we’re extending the Learn ArcGIS membership from the standard 60 days to August 31 st , and anyone who signs up will have that extended access. The membership includes access to ArcGIS Online and over 20 apps including ArcGIS Pro, along with a library of lessons that are available in seven languages. New lessons on public health have just been added. To sign up for a membership in Learn ArcGIS, visit learn.arcgis.com/en/become-a-member/. This offer is retroactive for Learn ArcGIS users who registered since March 1. Any new signups may not see an immediate message communicating August 31 as an end date, but that is the effective end date. Messaging will be communicated later.  Below is a lists of FAQ we have seen from Educators, please feel free to ask additional questions. For additional questions please check our Student Access FAQs. Q: What is Learn ArcGIS? A:  Learn ArcGIS is a free resource for learning to use ArcGIS in the context of real-world problems.  It provides hands-on lessons for many products, such as ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, Story Maps, Survey123, and more – over twenty in all.    Lessons can be filtered by capability (e.g., mapping, spatial analysis, real-time visualization); product; industry; resource type; or geographic region.  Learn Paths are curated collections of resources on a given topic, such as spatial analysis or health, providing easy access to a series of activities.   Q: My institution already provides ArcGIS, how is this different?    A: If your institution already has ArcGIS deployed successfully, we recommend that students utilize the institution-provided licensing that is already in place. Therefore, this offer may not be applicable.  However, there are still students worldwide, who do not have access. Hence, we wanted to provide access for them.       Q: Does this offer create another ArcGIS Online account? Are they related?  A: This offer creates an account in the ArcGIS Online organization managed by Learn ArcGIS. This account is separate, and not related to any ArcGIS Online account provided by the university. To minimize confusion, if your institution already provides student licenses via their institution agreement (i.e. site license) AND if students are leveraging this free student license offer, please ensure that they are aware that the two accounts are separate.     Q: How do I copy content from my Learn membership to my university account?   A: Currently there are three ways to copy content from one organization to another - 1) ArcGIS Online Assistant, 2) GeoJOBE Admin tools, 3) ArcGIS API for Python.       Q: Where do I get the installation files/executables to install ArcGIS Pro?   A: Instructions will be sent via email when students register.  Students will receive one email message to activate their account, then a second message with instructions to download ArcGIS Pro.  Once you've received your account information, log into the Learn ArcGIS Organization and go to  https://learn.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-pro-for-learn-members/. Q: Does my Learn membership include ArcMap?   A: ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) is not included.  ArcGIS Pro is the desktop application included in the Learn membership. Q: What support is offered (e.g., download and installation, general software use), and how do I get help?  A: Community support is available in the Learn ArcGIS GeoNet community .  You can ask questions and search for information in the Content feed.   Q: I’m younger than 18 years; can I use this offer?  A: No, this offer is available only for students 18 years or older, based on Esri’s Privacy Policies.  If you’re a student under age 18, a parent or guardian can create an account on your behalf.  For additional questions please check our Student Access FAQs. ... View more

Due to coronavirus (COVID-19), many colleges/universities are moving to fully online classes.    In this webinar, select educators will discuss their approaches of moving a course online.  New media and delivery technologies must be adopted along with shifts in pedagogy – all while keeping course goals and program objectives at the forefront.   We’ll focus on what is practical in a short time-frame and highlight readily available resources.  We’ll hear from both veterans of online learning and educators who have just started teaching online in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.   Presenters include:  Patricia Carbajales, Clemson University Peter Knoop, University of Michigan Diana Ter-Ghazaryan, University of Miami   Joseph Kerski, University of Denver/Esri Jennifer Bernstein, USC/UCGIS   What: “Moving Your Course to Distance Learning”  Webinar  When:  Tuesday,  March 24, 2020 at 7:00 pm EDT / 4pm PDT  ****   Recording:      The Webinar recording can be found here.   Slides:      The slides from each presenter can be found here. ... View more

With COVID-19 causing colleges and universities to close doors for in-person courses, educators are seeking information on approaches to transition to a fully online classroom.   There are many challenges – providing access to technology in absence of the trusty physical classroom, providing licensing, adjusting our teaching style for the virtual classroom – all needing to be solved in a short timeframe!   Amidst of all the disruption, there is a tremendous opportunity ahead of us. While intimidating, this gives us an opportunity to re-invigorate our courses and to innovate.   Now is the time to identify and focus on your course's learning objectives and consider how ArcGIS Online (SaaS) instead of ArcGIS Pro or ArcMap (desktop GIS) will help you meet those objectives.  ArcGIS Online (and other apps) have minimal hardware requirements and run on Macs, tablets, and phones, making them more accessible than desktop GIS.  Web and mobile apps generally have a simpler user interface (fewer buttons and menus) that can be learned more quickly, keeping the focus on concepts and content.   Some more advanced objectives (most likely in advanced GIS course work) may still require desktop GIS; in these cases, consider a blend of SaaS and Desktop GIS.  ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro are designed to work together, so moving between the two is easy.  Starting with SaaS can buy additional time for you and/or your IT support staff to explore virtualization and remote access solutions for desktop GIS. That said, please consider moving your course activities to SaaS – ArcGIS Online and Apps – for which students only need an internet connection.     A few items to think about:      Desktop-only GIS is a thing of the past - for a while now, we have encouraged the use of SaaS technology such as ArcGIS Online and associated apps. Many educational institutions are highly leveraging apps like Story Maps, Survey123, Collector, among many others. These are now the starting point for geospatial technology in the classroom. And fortunately, there are many online learning resources to get us started quickly.        The technology has grown immensely over the years - many capabilities are possible with ArcGIS Online and Apps. We can maintain our current learning objectives and map them to some of these newer online learning resources. Some examples:      Symbology and Visualization –plenty of basic concepts can be covered with ArcGIS Online and apps such as Insights for ArcGIS.      Spatial analysis –ArcGIS Online has fundamental capabilities for querying and summarizing data, calculating proximity, and overlaying layers.      Field data collection workflows – there are many apps available to collect locations and attributes, such as Collector and Survey123. Bottom line: Use some of these lessons and e-learning/web courses as a base, as opposed to re-writing your existing materials, then pose additional challenges for your students.      Today’s students are fast learners - they have no problem with new technology and will welcome the opportunity to experiment. In addition, the SaaS technology and apps are easier to work with than desktop applications.      This is a forgiving time – if something doesn’t work, that is OK. Students will be open/receptive in this time of disruptive change. We are not going to design a perfect online course in such a short timeframe, it is not realistic. We need to do what is practical and feasible. Here are a few quotes from Higher Education colleagues that support the above.      Clemson University: In our pilot to test moving a course to fully online, we limited instruction to ArcGIS Online. This is my advice if institutions haven’t virtualized yet, have little experience with it, and had to rush to move online, as students might not have the right computer/access/space) etc.       NC State University: If our in-house virtual environment were to become overloaded for some reason and all else fails, we would look for ways to supplement our instruction with more ArcGIS Online examples where we can, particularly at the undergraduate level.       University of Minnesota: ArcGIS Online removes much of the stress associated with quickly moving my in-person courses to all online. ... View more

With COVID-19 causing colleges and universities to move their courses online, educators are seeking information on how to provide access to ArcGIS software for students working remotely, and at times, needing additional licenses.      At Esri, we are fully committed to providing enough licenses to support continuity of courses and ensure no disruption. Below is an outline of availability of licenses and recommendations on how to deploy to students. In short, Colleges and Universities who already have Education Institution Agreement (former Site License), should have enough licenses for the entire campus. Colleges and Universities with a small or medium Departmental Agreement, or an older LabPack license, can receive a Large Departmental Agreement, to provision sufficient ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap licenses.  Colleges and Universities with Education Institution Agreement (former Site License):      Use on any device – please encourage students, faculty and staff to install ArcGIS on their own devices (ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap). With the new Institution Agreement (former site license), now technology can be installed and licensed on any student-owned device.      Best way to distribute executables and single use licenses – please use your institutional file share to distribute any desktop executables and licensing (ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap) – GoogleDrive, Box, OneDrive, etc. We recommend licensing ArcGIS Pro via ArcGIS Online Named User. For ArcMap, please share the executable on your institutional file share, and the same single use license file can be used by everyone on campus (total of 5,000). Please read this blog for further information.      Unlimited ArcGIS Online Named Users for teaching and research – with the updated Institution Agreement, we have unlimited named users available for teaching and research. If your institution has not migrated to the new institution agreement, and you are running low on Named Users, please contact your Education Account Manager. We will provision additional Named Users to you, to support your courses.      Provision ArcGIS Online Named User licenses for ALL new users – please leverage New Member Defaults in ArcGIS Online. Ideally, you would work with your IT colleagues to setup Single Sign On (enterprise logins) for students to use their university credentials, but if this is not feasible in a short time frame, New Member Defaults can still be used for ArcGIS-only named users. This enables any new students who login to ArcGIS Online to be provisioned for any licensing.     Colleges and Universities with a small/medium Departmental Agreement, or older LabPack license (limited licenses):      We will be offering a donation of a Large Departmental Agreement to our customers with a term end date of 08/31/2020. This will provision (100) each ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcMap licenses. Please license ArcGIS Pro via ArcGIS Online Named User.       To request the donation:             -  If you are outside the United States, please contact your local Esri Distributor.             -  If you are inside the United States, please fill out this form. Please disregard the “Site License” notation.                We will make additional licenses available to all customers, not just those with a site license.      Please consider moving to Institution Agreement in the future, as it provides unlimited allocation of named users along with many other benefits. Please contact your Education Account Manager or local Esri Distributor with questions.      Please follow the above recommendations for distributing executables and licensing (desktop and Names Users).   Other recommendations:      We realize that not all students have personal computers, and even if they do, ArcGIS Pro has certain system requirements which may not be met with older hardware. Please check our COVID-19 Educator Support space which lists additional resources, such as this Virtualization of ArcGIS: On-premise and Cloud Options for Higher Education blog.        Run ArcGIS Pro on a Mac – please refer to the documentation, many students successfully run ArcGIS Pro on Mac machines.      If it is not possible for students to run desktop software on their own machines, and not possible to virtualize ArcGIS in a short timeframe, please consider moving to SAAS – ArcGIS Online and Apps, where students only need an internet connection. The technology has grown immensely over the years, and many capabilities are possible with ArcGIS Online and Apps. While intimidating, this gives us an opportunity to re-invigorate. Please check this blog for many online learning resources - keep your learning objectives and competencies, and map them to some of these existing resources. ... View more

COVID-19 has impacted us in many ways. There is an increasing number of institutions who are temporarily postponing or cancelling in-person courses, and on-ground faculty may be faced with having to migrate their courses to online learning. Of course, planning, available support, and clear communication are paramount to helping make such transition and ease both faculty and student anxiety.   We wanted to share several online resources that are available to supplement online learning. You likely know many of them, but they could be a lifeline for those faculty who have not utilized them, as many of these resources are conducive to remote and self-paced student learning.   Learn ArcGIS – a wonderful collection of short and focused lessons. A relatively new option is the notion of Paths, feel free to browse them.  Esri Training – search web courses and explore notion of a “learning plans”. ArcGIS Documentation – lots of tutorials depending on technology focus. Hiding in there are gems such as these Analytics case studies, many of which have accompanying Story Map, data, and guided workflows, for example. Esri Press books, available at no cost to students and instructors until May 25th via the VitalSource Helps program. FAQ for students/educators is here. Developer Labs – for students in programming-related courses Esri Video channel Explore ArcGIS Blog and pose questions such as How can local governments respond to COVIT-19. Specific examples: Have students explore and utilize collections of StoryMaps to present their work, publish Surveys to gather information about a topic, use ArcGIS Online to explore, create, analyze information. We would like to express particular appreciation and support to the many colleagues whose role is to support educators across campuses leverage geospatial technology. Folks sitting in libraries, instructional resource centers and technology support offices, may be faced with increased demand to provide support for moving courses to remote instruction.    Further, we have a close community of GIS educators – a community who has inspired and supported one another. If you have advice to offer, or need advice on approaches to transition courses, please feel free to post here. If a virtual meeting space is a desired mode to share practices, we can help facilitate that.  ... View more

Sharing a wonderful resource - a webinar recording and slides on “Teaching Practical Spatial Data Science and Deep Learning”. Huge thanks to Dr. Ilya Zaslavsky, UCSD and Dmitry Kudinov, Esri, for their wonderful presentation. “Teaching Practical Spatial Data Science and Deep Learning” recording “DSC 170 Spatial Data Science and Applications” slides (Dr. Zaslavsky) “Teaching Practical Spatial Data Science and Deep Learning” slides (Mr. Kudinov)   Thanks to all attended for the wonderful questions/discussion. ... View more

With the updated Education Institutional Agreement (former site license), we have simplified Single Use licensing by including the core product and all extensions in one authorization code.  One authorization code now unlocks both the core app and all extensions* for the following products:   ArcGIS Pro Advanced (though we encourage a named user license model in most cases) ArcGIS Desktop – ArcMap Advanced ArcGIS Enterprise – ArcGIS GIS Server Advanced   *Note:  The Locate XT and Business Analyst extensions are an exception and have separate authorization codes.   In addition, the Education Institution Agreement now includes 2 sets of licenses for all products:  Academic Use and Administrative Use.  Separating Administrative Use from Academic Use keeps operational maps and data safe and secure without limiting experimentation and innovation by students and researchers.    You will see different quantities for Academic and Administrative use under "View Authorizations".   The authorization codes for Administrative Use licenses are explicitly labeled as Administrative Use, e.g.,: Education Site ArcGIS Pro – Education License; Administrative Use License Education Site ArcGIS Desktop – Education License; Administrative Use License Education Site ArcGIS Server Enterprise – Education License; Administrative Use License   The authorization codes for Academic Use licenses are labeled as follows: Education Site ArcGIS Pro – Site License Education Site ArcGIS Desktop – Site License Education Site ArcGIS Server Enterprise – Site License   License files are created on My Esri under the Licensing tab, using the License Esri Products link. Please ensure that you are leveraging this option for any ArcGIS Enterprise GIS Server and ArcGIS Desktop licensing.   To generate Portal instances for ArcGIS Enterprise for versions 10.7 and above, use the License Esri Products link. For versions 10.4 - 10.6.1, the licenses are created using the Generate Portal for ArcGIS Licenses link.     If you require earlier versions of ArcGIS Enterprise for v10.3-10.8.1, these can be created upon request. Please contact your Customer Service representative for assistance.  ... View more