GIS Education Weekly: White House Funding Free Community College for Skilled Occupations

Grants for Free Community College Programs Supporting Skilled Occupations

Current state of free community
college programs, via fact sheet

A new federal program announced on Monday by Vice President Biden and his wife, a community college professor, funds free tuition for some students. The initiative provides funding through the Labor Department "to partnerships between employers, training programs, and community and technical colleges aimed at readying students for skilled occupations. Award recipients must extend tuition-free education to unemployed, underemployed and low-income workers to enter industries that require skilled labor."  Will GIS be one of the skilled occupations? I'll keep an eye out!

NSF Funds Transformative Research in Geography Education

The National Science Foundation, through its Geography and Spatial Sciences program, has awarded the AAG and Texas State University a five-year, $400,000 grant to develop a research coordination network (RCN) for transformative research in geography education. The RCN will be a project of the National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) under the direction of Dr. Michael Solem (AAG) and Dr. Richard G. Boehm (Texas State University).

This research effort, described in an AAG press release, looks to me like the first work based on the The Road Map for 21st Century Geography Education project. Not familiar with that effort? I wrote about the deliverables in 2013.

Subscribe!

Get this GIS education update free, via e-mail, every Thursday! 

GIS Education Weekly: ConnectED at 2, R Course, When Maps Lie

ConnectED at Year Two

The White House put out a fact sheet about its ConnectED Initiative now that it's two years old. Esri has been in the program for one year at this point (press release from 2014).

Here's how Esri was listed among the private sector contributors:

Esri: Providing $[sic] free access to ArcGIS Online Organization accounts – the same Geographic Information Systems mapping technology used by government and business – to every K-12 school in America to allow students to map and analyze data.

I'm not sure why a dollar amount was not included; it was for other companies.

Esri put out a map: the national map of ConnectED commitments from a handful of companies:

U of A Putting GIS in the Library
Staff members of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Collections and Archives division plan to create a service to improve students’ research capabilities. The division was awarded a $4,000 grant to develop GIS support for student research at Ottenheimer Library.

The grant is seed money for the library to install a GIS workstation, train librarians and staff on GIS theory and methodology, and support the development of an interdisciplinary GIS project in collaboration with faculty.

Subscribe!

If you'd rather get these weekly posts via e-mail, sign up here!

MentorLinks Builds GIS Programs at Community Colleges

The Atlantic details the MentorLinks program, one I'd never heard of, but one that has touched GIS, but more on that later.

One good model for capacity building at the sub-baccalaureate level is the MentorLinks program, administered by the American Association of Community Colleges as part of the Advancing Technological Education program, which is Congressionally mandated and funded by the National Science Foundation. The MentorLinks program isn't big or flashy, but for a relatively modest investment in a select number of STEM programs at community colleges, it appears to achieve some significant, lasting results.

Here's how it works: through a national grant competition, AACC selects a small number of community colleges for a two-year grant program. The current 2011-2013 cohort has eight grantees, bringing the grand total of grantees since the program started in 2002 to just 33. Each grantee receives a modest grant to fund program development (for the current cohort, the two-year grant total was just $20,000) along with funding for travel to attending national meetings.  

The grantees represent a range of technical education programs from across the country, and each is matched with a mentor who has knowledge and connections in the area of STEM training the grantees plan to develop, with mentors receiving a small stipend. Working closely with their mentors, faculty and staff from the colleges endeavor to establish or strengthen a specific program, often in partnership with regional and local partners in government and industry.

I dug through the archives at MentorLinks to find grantee who tackled GIS. I found one, from Lincoln Land Community College in Illinois (where else?). Search this pdf for GIS and you'll find the write up about an intro GIS course offered in 2010 and some workshops with Esri. There was a plan for a certificate program in 2011. As of today I see just that same single GIS intro course in the course catalog.

Digging deeper into the past, I learned the City College of San Francisco worked on a "GIS Across the Curriculum" project (pdf of results) while Springfield Technical Community College, MA worked on "Advancing Workforce Education in GIS" in 2005-2007 (pdf of results). Kentucky Community and Technical College System, KY tackled "Geographical Information Systems Partnership" (ppt of results) back in 2002-2004. There's a 2009 article from the Community College Times explaining how the model pairs mentors from other community colleges with those trying to build programs and well as how some mentees turned mentors joined the GeoTech Center.
These efforts seem to pre-date and create the building blocks for work done by the GeoTech Center and other players, including Esri. Do we have enough experience, documentation and insight to build a best practices document aimed at creating or growing a successful community college GIS program?

- The Atlantic

Competition Conundrum: Essay or Poster?

I read about two GIS/geography competitions recently. One is hosted by the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, URISA. It has undergrad/grad students submit papers and community college/certificate students submit posters. The other is from the Royal Geographical Society and has older students submit essays (which can include graphics) and younger ones submit map or diagrams.

Why? Why are the four year degree folks and older students expected to write and the two year/certificate folks and younger students expected to create graphics? Could they all write essays? Sure. Could they all create graphics? Sure. So, why the dividing line?