GIS Education Weekly: Using StoryMaps to Teach about UASs

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Pilot Online: Online map details history of the state’s former Rosenwald schools for African Americans - "...Preservation Virginia recently completed an online, interactive map of the state’s Rosenwald Schools — 382 of the more than 5,300 built in the South from 1917 to 1932." I noted a grant to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to map the schools back in 2017.

The Guardian: Denmark frees 32 inmates over flaws in phone geolocation evidence - "Denmark has released 32 prisoners as part of an ongoing review of 10,700 criminal cases after serious questions arose about the reliability of geolocation data obtained from mobile phone operators, local media have reported." Via Thierry Gregorius.

GIS Education Weekly: Esri Education GIS Conference

Esri Education GIS Conference

(Reminder and disclaimer: I have accepted a job with Esri. I was not in San Diego this past week and gathered this coverage from afar.)

Did you notice the map on the cover of this year's map book? It's Pat Kennelly's sky model terrain map! Kennelly teaches at LIU Post and Penn State. h/t @colorbrewer

The details of Esri making all e-learning free to all users (with qualifying products on maintenance) were shared at the opening Esri UC plenary. The new training site is not yet available, but a teaser site with a Q & A and video is. When launched the site will include education resources, including GeoInquiries and SpatiaLABS. Among the licenses and programs that qualify for the free resources are those commonly used in teaching and learning including Esri Higher Education Enterprise Licenses (Education Site License) and the ArcGIS for Personal Use Program.

GIS Education Weekly: Drones for Education Act, Promising Research, Geospatial at Temple

Drones for Education Act Introduced

U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) today announced they are introducing the Higher Education UAS Modernization Act, legislation that would support the operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), commonly referred to as drones, by higher education institutions for research and educational purposes and workforce development. Under current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, colleges and universities are treated the same as commercial drone users, meaning students and professors  must apply for approval from the FAA, obtain a pilot’s license and are restricted to using only pre-approved aircraft.

A number of schools (Smith College and Penn State to name two) and organizations (Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land-grant Universities) support the Act. As I understand it, the act evolved from efforts begun by Smith College's Paul Voss, an associate professor of engineering in 2014. Here's a video of Voss discussing the issues in 2015 on the local PBS station.

The 8th Annual NGTC Geospatial Technology Summer Workshop, 2016

The National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence (NGTC), in partnership with Southwestern College and San Diego State University, will host the 8th annual NGTC Geospatial Technology Summer Workshop. The workshop will be held in the Richard Wright Spatial Analysis Lab on the campus of SDSU from June 22 -24, 2016. It's right before, and attendees get free admission to, the Esri Education GIS Conference. There are stipends, too.

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Temple University GeoNews

I received an e-mail advertisement for the residence program introduced with I guess the double entrendre, "Earn a degree with sustainability." The pitch:

The PSM in GIS is an accredited program, designed to train a highly competent workforce, ready to meet the demands of the job market. Our curriculum integrates rigorous technical training with business, ethics, and professional development. 

In, other news from the school, a handful of classes at Temple University invite undergraduate and graduate students using their bodies as tools of spatial exploration. “Bodies in Geography” and “Bodies Studio” I and II are taught by Allison Hayes-Conroy, an assistant professor of geography and urban studies. The vision: to help students find new ways to think about the human body—more specifically, how the body is viewed through social and biological sciences.

GIS Education Research

A team from Illinois State designed a curriculum and produced maps using QGIS as part of a three year $450,000 study funded by the National Science Foundation. Fourth and fifth graders in Springfield Illinois are the main testers. The goal of the program is to see if using GIS, which helps college and high schools improve spatial thinking, will do the same with elementary school students. Preliminary findings have been encouraging. The curriculum and research materials are available.

"Lessons that incorporate publicly available data from Earth observing sensors can expose students to the thrill of scientific discovery." That's the subhead of an article by a team reporting on  the Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration Project (Project EDDIE). The idea is to expose college students to the excitement and challenge of working with real world data. A curriculum was developed and its success is being assessed. The work looks promising.

A pilot study reported by Carey et al. [2015] indicates that working on modules improved students’ quantitative literacy and enabled them to grapple with difficult concepts such as data visualization and how resolution affects our ability to detect environmental changes.

Quote of the Week

I graduated last Spring and have essentially only used ArcGIS software in college and my last job, and have minimal experience with QGIS and Whitebox GAT.

This from a newly hired GIS professional posting on on Reddit/GIS. The poster next needs to learn Smallworld. I am concerned by the poster's lack of confidence in learning something new. The more packages a student touches in school and the workplace, the more confident he or she will be picking up the next release or a new package. How many different software packages do your GIS students touch?

How In-App Purchases for Geography App Worked for Montessorium

A screen from Montessorium's geography learning app

They didn't, per Three Lessons From Offering In-App Purchases, by the company's CEO. I'll note that building and making money from edtech is hard! Bottom line on the changes made in the Intro to Geography app:

What really happened is that we confused users with buried purchased points, made it impossible for some institutions to even buy it, and undervalued the worth of our product.

Points of Interest

NCGE is requesting those interested in funding for geography at the K-12 level from the U.S. government contact their senators. This is the next step in funding grants detailed in ESSA.

Stone Environmental built a story map to provide interactive public access to the Bennington, VT Downtown Area-Wide Plan (via Geolibrary-L). I found this data point interesting:

Total effort to build this was about 20 hours, mainly because of the number of pages. We feel that 8-10 hours would be average time to build a decent Story Map Journal using the template and tools available on ArcGIS Online.

An interactive map, put together by the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the University of Georgia's eHistory initiative, taps the Library of Congress' database of historical newspapers, Chronicling America, to track frequency of keywords in newspapers and visualize the results across time and space. It's built on CartoDB. More at Slate.

McGraw-Hill Education has withdrawn a textbook and plans to destroy all copies of it due to criticism that four maps in the book are inaccurate. The political science textbook, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World is no longer available.

A bit of the top level domain cartogram

Diana Sinton profiles the The USAID GeoCenter and its Mapping for Resilience University Consortium, also known as mappersU, a “global community of university students, faculty, and scholars who create and use open geographic data and analyses that addresses locally defined development challenges worldwide.”

I love this cartogram of top level country domains.

Esri Education GIS News

GISCI is now considering offering the GISCI Geospatial Core Technical Knowledge Exam at the Esri UC conference in San Diego, CA, scheduled for the last week in June. The organization requests a show of interest via e-mail in this press release.

@GISed has been featuring new GeoInquiries all week.

New Website and Possible New Campus for Unmanned Vehicle University

I've written about Unmanned Vehicle University several times in recent years (1, 2, 3). I realized I'd not received an e-mail from them in some months, since January 2013. I'd been getting an e-mail roughly monthly before that with an invitation to start a degree or an announcement about a book or a new publishing program.

When I visited the university website I was surprised to find it was redone. The old slow, frankly archaic version was replaced by a slick modern one. And, clearly, the team that put it together did their homework. They removed all links to my coverage in the media area, some if it not quite so positive, I confess. They de-emphasized the school's licensing (noted here) and accreditation (no mention I could find) and simplified the process of admission to four steps: download catalog, fill out form, fax or e-mail application (no, you can't apply online), pay money. There are even testimonials from students, though some are not as positive as others.

So what else is new at UVU since January?

There are a number of new offerings, mostly videos on DVD, on topics such as UAVs and firefighting, UAVs for police work, driverless car design , a DIY drone kit, starting a UAV business, among others.

The university is hiring a COO, instructors and international directors.

There's a list of current job openings (some of which had expired).

The university has partnered (not clear how) with an unmanned vehicle industry headhunter.

UVU was selected for a training contract with an unidentified overseas customer for $435,000.

A press release (from the above contract announcement) from April offers these stats about the university. UVU graduated 150 students from courses (not necessarily degrees or certificates) in 2012, and anticipate 300 students enrolling in 2013. Other PRs about the new courses, the granting of a trademark, etc. are listed on a press release site, not the university's own website.

The university notes financial aid is available from two private employers via tuition assistance (US Airways and URS) and the State of Arizona. It also points students to a federal program for workers who lost jobs because of foreign trade.

The university started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10 million to build a campus.

Currently, all of our courses are online and our students are all over the world. We need your help to fund a brick and mortar campus. The funds will be used to build classrooms, administrative offices and student housing and provide scholarships. All donors will have their name and level included in the UVU donors book. Gold level donors will have their personal or business name engraved on bricks that pave Unmanned Leaders Plaza which will host statues of unmanned air, ground, sea and space vehicles.

To date, there has not been a single donation. The "pitch video" on the crowdfunding page is an introduction to the university's three day course.

Unmanned Vehicle University Obtains License; Offers Free Book Publishing

I've been following Unmanned Vehicle University (UVU) on this blog for abut a year (previous articles: 1, 2). I keep an eye on it for two reasons. First, it's in the geospatial/GIS/remote sensing arena and second, it's a for-profit institution. I regularly receive e-mails from the school about upcoming courses and new offerings such as videos and books, but I do not receive news about the school itself. That information I have to dig up myself.

So, what's new at UVU since late 2012? Quite a lot!

In November university president Dr (Col Ret) Jerry LeMieux contributed to Big Beacon, a website about new ways to teach engineering. In his post titled Innovator’s Notebook: A New Approach to Unmanned Systems Engineering Education he scoped out the unique vision for UVU. It included decisions to:

• Start from a student’s perspective. [Connect course content to job (job market).]
• Recruit world-class expert faculty. [Require a PhD in engineering and tons of experience. Use social media to find faculty all over the world.]
• Keep content real worldly, relevant, and applicable. [Mix delivery systems for content (lectures, videos, reading) and for student work (problem sets, papers, take home evaluations).]
• Set a realistic business model and competitive pricing. [Make course fees low to serve areas with limited income (South America, India) and use off-site adjunct faculty to keep overhead manageable.]

Also in November I learned from LiDAR News' Gene Roe about the university's journal. "The International Journal of Unmanned Systems Engineering – (IJUSEng) is the official journal of Unmanned Vehicle University and the first journal exclusively dedicated to unmanned systems engineering." The January 2013 is the first issue and includes three free-to-read articles. There are also details on how to contribute and subscribe. The quarterly online publication is $495 for individuals and $150 for students. The publication is based in the UK. The editor, Dr Pascual Marques, has a company called Marques Aviation, which sells aircraft related products and services (website copyright 2010). He is UK Director for UVU.

On December 12 the University announced by press release a license to grant degrees in Arizona.

Unmanned Vehicle University just received a university license from the Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education. The license grants UVU the authority to grant Doctorate and Masters Degrees in Unmanned (Air/Ground/Sea/Space) Systems Engineering. A Certificate in Unmanned Systems Project Management is also available for Undergraduates.

The Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education license shows no accreditations. I'm guessing that means that the board does not recognize the accreditation from International Association for Distance Learning UVU holds. Or perhaps that accreditation ran out? (I noted the IADL membership in a previous article.)

Interestingly,"fully accredited degrees," a phrase on the UVU homepage for some time, is no longer mentioned anywhere on the website. While exploring the Arizona license, I learned that the school does not operate in Washington State.  UVU "is not a legal degree-granting school in the state of Washington," per the Washington Student Achievement Council.

In late December the University posted a job for a recruiter noting a salary of 10K per month (120K per year, wow)! I saw it on several job boards including SimplyHired.com. 

At the end of December UVU announced, again via press release, a program to pay for the publication of the first 50 approved texts about UAVs submitted. The gory details are on the UVU Press page; it suggests publication could cost between $3K and $5K without this aid. The press already has one book approved: Dr Oren Gal, who is working on his PhD at the Technion in Israel, had his book titled "Marine Robotic Concepts and Science" approved.

To start off 2013 the University received the trademark (press release) for Unmanned Vehicle University, describing it as "Unmanned vehicle training and education."

UVU is clearly working hard to keep both its educational integrity high while boosting its bottom line.

A Look at Unmanned Vehicle University

Unmanned Vehicle University opened its online doors in February of 2012, after about a year of planning. The school currently offers online courses using Webex. Some are non-credit "executive certificate" courses (you receive a certificate of completion) while others are part of certificate programs (a one year post-baccalaureate program) or Masters and PhD degrees related to UAVs/UASs. Short courses, typically three days, are offered in person. The faculty includes some 30 experts in the field located all over the world. In August the school had about 50 students.

Jerry LeMieux, a retired Air Force colonel, commercial airline pilot, and college lecturer founded the university and is leading the marketing charge. You can hear him on this podcast interview with Small UAS News.

UVU received its accreditation in July 2012 from the International Association for Distance Learning. Wikipedia includes that association on its list of unrecognized higher education accreditation organizations.

Executive non-credit courses cost $999 (eight weeks) while certificate/degree courses (12 weeks) run $1600. A masters degree requires eight courses (no masters thesis is required) and runs $12,800. A PhD requires ten courses, plus 36 credits of dissertation preparation and a defense. I calculate the cost at $25,600. The Unmanned Vehicle University Graduate Course Catalog and Student Handbook, 2012 – 2013 with details is available in a PDF titled "graduate catalog" on this page.

The university shared recently that it is looking to gain Federal Aviation Administration certification, is writing a first textbook on UAVs, and hopes to open a physical campus at Lake Havasu City, AZ. An e-mail to prospective students in early September included plans for financial aid and Veterans Administration benefits for students:

FINANCIAL AID AND VA BENEFITS
We are working very hard to get financial aid and VA benefits approved. Please be patient with this certification process. We anticipate this occurring in the later part of 2013. Once we have this approval, the course prices will increase by 100%. Anyone who enrolls now, willl [sic] be grandfathered into the lower price structure.

I wanted to be sure members of the GIS education community were aware of this university and its programs.

More Information:

- Unmanned Vehicle University
- Washington Times
- Las Vegas Review Journal

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update 10/11/12: You can now buy the UAV Fundamemtals Course
on DVD for $650 via Amazon.

Learn the basics of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). This DVD includes 16 hours of lectures from the popular Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV) Fundamentals Executive Course offered by Unmanned Vehicle University.

- e-mail from UVU