Hello Anthony and others in the OSGeo Education space.
Anthony,
It seems your email is not getting through to our email lists, which is
probably because you are not subscribed. I suggest doing so here:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss
All,
See Anthony's response below.
This email thread was started on the OSGeo Discuss list, but please
continue on the edu-discuss list. In responding to this email, please
drop the [email protected] in response (and subscribe to the
edu-discuss if you wish to follow along).
Anthony,
There have been quite a bit of discussion on our edu-discuss list about
MOOCs, and so your course and what you have learned so far is very
relevant to all of us.
The part of MOOC development which personally interests me (extending
from my involvement in OSGeo-Live) is how to develop a process for
maintaining and extending MOOC courses. In particular, from within the
30,000 students attending your course, there is likely to be many with
excellent ideas for improvements. How do you capture such ideas, and at
the same time retain the single focus and simplicity core to good
educational material? How do you ensure that your material is updated
whenever software is updated? How can your training material be retasked
for a different audience (eg for primary school students)? Then once you
have multiple courses all based upon the same core material, how do you
ensure they all get updated together?
These are questions we have working on when generating documentation for
OSGeo-Live, which I've described here:
http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/memoirs-of-cat-herder-coordinating.html
With regards to some of your other points, I'll be interested to hear
responses from the Educators within the OSGeo community. (I'm better
described as a Software Developer, Technical Writer and Coordinator).
On 30/06/13 03:20, ANTHONY C ROBINSON wrote:
Hi Cameron,
I really appreciate you touching base with me about this and sharing
your discussions on my MOOC.
I hadn't yet seen the OSGeo-Live site or packages -- this is great to
know about and I will change my instructions in the class to point to
these resources instead of the piece-by-piece approach I'd been taking
with respect to highlighting various open source geo-efforts. While
students in the class will use ArcGIS Online for 4 of the 5 lab
assignments, for the final lab assignment I have created a
tiered-approach with multiple options to hopefully encourage some of
the most eager/tech savvy students to try out platforms like QGIS,
GRASS, etc...
I'm aware of some OS community angst about my selection of AGOL for
doing most of the labs in the course. I've worked for 10 years in the
GeoVISTA Center, a GIScience research center that has been very active
in developing open source systems for geovisualization and
geocomputation. In addition, I lead Online Geospatial Education
programs at Penn State, which to my knowledge represent the only
Geography programs that provide Open Educational Resources for nearly
all of its online courses (open.ems.psu.edu). So the clear value and
innovation associated with all things open is not lost on me, and I
recognize that there are some important considerations to be had with
having MOOC students use a commercial platform. I won't answer all of
them here ( and I would never claim to be an infallible decision
maker), but it may be helpful to understand some of the motivation for
this course and its design:
·The class is designed for people who may use maps but have never made
their own. It is not designed to teach GIS pros/academics something
new. It's designed to encourage new geospatial people to emerge; to
rethink maps and what they can do.
·It is not designed to train people to use GIS software. The focus is
on understanding the most basic things about Geography and Mapping. It
functions much like a 1 credit zero-level class that we might teach
here on campus.
·A MOOC on Coursera typically reaches at least 30,000 people in its
first run (mine will be no exception) and includes 60-75% of its
students from outside the United States.
·I chose a mapping platform that my Grandpa could realistically use
(he's signed up for the class) in the first week of the class, and
that would not require anything to be downloaded.
·Esri is providing technical support in the course forums to ensure
that nothing blows up and that problems are very quickly remedied. No
money is associated at all with this relationship, and I approached
them first because my former boss, David DiBiase, directs their
education team and I knew he would understand what I did and did not
want in terms of a partnership. I know they get a bad rap quite often
(frequently for good reason) but I have to say that every part of this
cooperation has been on my terms and excellent.
There are absolutely great ways to re-imagine this type of course with
purely open source stuff driving lab assignments. Nothing would make
me happier than to see the OsGeo community develop a second version of
this class with different ways to complete the labs. I think that
would be awesome. If I can be useful toward that end, please let me know.
I'm very interested in any advice folks can give me about the best
ways to share the content I've developed for this course. Coursera
doesn't make it easy for me to export the whole thing into a reusable
package. We use Drupal here in our PSU programs to provide content, so
my thought is to try and convert everything to that CMS and provide it
in that manner. Others have suggested using GitHub, but I want to
avoid simply uploading a pile of PDFs and Videos and assuming that
that would be "good enough." Everything in the class will be offered
under a CC non-commercial license at any rate -- like our other open
courseware at PSU.
I also can't imagine that there would only ever be one MOOC on
Mapping. That's crazy. There ought to be just as many as we see now
for various CompSci and Engineering topics. I'm very excited to share
everything I learn from this experience, comparing it to how we
develop other online courses (we offer ~25 here and I have 5 years of
teaching geospatial stuff online), and considering the meaning of
"open" when it comes to such things. I would agree with many critics
that MOOCs themselves are not necessarily as "open" as they perhaps
should be. Most of the big platforms (Coursera included) are trying to
figure out a revenue stream from this stuff, for example, and as I've
mentioned they definitely don't make it easy to repurpose things
elsewhere.
The class is 99% ready to go and opens on July 17^th . I would be very
happy to hear any and all feedback (including, if you think its
warranted, that I am a colossal idiot) once it's launched. Each week
for five weeks a new lesson will roll out, with video lectures, lots
of written/graphical content, lab assignments, and discussions on
things like geospatial privacy, the impact of social media on mapping,
etc... At the bare minimum it is very exciting to imagine what tens of
thousands of people will do when they make their first maps.
TL:DR -- I'll definitely point to the live.osgeo resources and making
a MOOC is complicated but I am very eager to share what I learn. :)
Cheers,
-Anthony
Anthony C. Robinson, PhD
Lead Faculty for Online Geospatial Education, John A. Dutton
e-Education Institute
Assistant Director, GeoVISTA Center
Department of Geography
The Pennsylvania State University
www.personal.psu.edu/acr181/
*From:*Cameron Shorter [mailto:[email protected]]
*Sent:* Friday, June 28, 2013 4:18 PM
*To:* Anthony Robinson
*Cc:* Rick Smith; Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas; OSGeo Discussions;
[email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Maps and the Geospatial Revolution from
Jul 17th 2013 at Coursera
Hi Anthony,
As per emails below, you can see that people have been talking about
your "Maps and the Geospatial Revolution" course within the Open
Source Geospatial communities.
Are you aware of the OSGeo-Live USB/DVD/Virtual Machine?
http://live.osgeo.org
OSGeo-Live provides a distribution of 50 of the best Geospatial Open
Source applications all preinstalled and configured with sample data,
ready for use in courses such as yours. It also includes Project
Overviews and Quickstarts for all these applications:
http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/overview.html
I'm CCing the OSGeo Education email list, which are also doing great
things. In particular, they have been building up a network of Open
Source Geospatial Labs within Universities around the world.
On 28/06/2013 10:50 PM, Rick Smith wrote:
Myself and two colleagues are currently running a (mini)MOOC on
geospatial technology. We are using QGIS for two of the labs and
indiemapper for two of the labs We chose QGIS because we wanted
to keep the 'Open' in MOOC truly open. indiemapper is not open
source, but it is free to use and there is no push for signing up
for accounts or paying for services, so we think maybe it is
little 'o' open :)
Anyway, if interested, view
http://catalyst-academy.org/course/geospatial-tech-for-stemx-learning/
and you can sign up for free at:
*https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/KK6JML
<https://webmail.tamucc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=AC1eOI7a4kWyYoJN_gLUyI_cUUyQR9AI-WUGtL9ubS9qdamfDQFC_PqgbX6eM1v-Oy6o2IM0nd8.&URL=https%3a%2f%2fcanvas.instructure.com%2fenroll%2fKK6JML>*
Cheers,
-Rick
http://gisc.tamucc.edu
On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:25 AM, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 28 June 2013 01:45, Mateusz Loskot <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I thought there may be interest here:
>
> https://www.coursera.org/course/maps
>
> --
> Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
Thanks for sharing
It's funny that this course relies only on a privative online mapping
platform, with the massive amount of free software and data resources
for learning available out there. I'd love to see a Coursera/or any
other MOOC using OSGeo Live!!
Cheers
--
Jorge Sanz
http://es.osgeo.org
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--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com
--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com
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