GIS Education Weekly: Best Visualizations of 2017

Resources

One of many "subway" maps you can see stretched
into geographical space in a GIF at ArchDaily

ArchDaily: These GIFs Compare Cities' Metro Maps to Their Real Life Geography - The GIFs are from Reddit.

Ars Technica: Why experts believe cheaper, better lidar is right around the corner - Timothy Lee explains the state of lidar. Via @nickrsan.

GIS Education Weekly: Update on UC Davis Coursera Specialization

Update on the UC Davis Coursera Specialization

As promised back at the end of last year, here's a Q&A with Nick Santos on the state of the UC Davis five course Coursera GIS specialization. Thanks to Nick for taking the time to answer my questions.

1) How’s it going teaching desktop users remotely? So far as I know, you were the second MOOC instructor to do so. You noted that as a key distinguisher of the specialization.

It's going well - the biggest challenge for me is volume of students. [When] things in an in-person course don't go perfectly, you're around to address [them] with the students. [In the specialization,  issues must be] smoothed over and made clear online. The great thing is that this format allows for rapid iteration, so fixes for unclear items can be made as soon as we have them ready, but it's still a lot to deal with so many students who understand instructions a little differently.

GIS Education Weekly: MOOCs, Guides, and Enslavement

Maps and the Geospatial Revolution now Available as Open Educational Resource

Now available for self study or re-use in your classes - the Maps MOOC (link is external) offered on Coursera is now offered as an Open Educational Resource by Penn State.

Here's the content. It's one of many OER Geography and other courses from Penn State. The About Page of the open content explains that the course may not be taught as a Coursera MOOC again:

• Will this class be taught again as a MOOC on Coursera (or elsewhere)?  

• I don't know yet. I would love to, but Coursera is radically changing how it does courses and I may not be able to spend the time necessary to convert how I do this course to fit their new model. Teaching a MOOC is a voluntary portion of my job (and most others who teach MOOCs), so it's important to understand that what my day job expects from me vs. what people want me to do for free are often incompatible with one another.

More on Geo-MOOCs

Diana Sinton offers an update on geo MOOCs at Directions Magazine. Of interest: quotes from ten people who took one or more geospatial MOOCs during 2014 or 2015.

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GIS Education Weekly: UC Davis Launches Five Course GIS Specialization on Coursera

UC Davis Launches Five Course GIS Specialization on Coursera

Basics

In February the University of California Davis will launch a series of five GIS MOOCs, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialization, on the Coursera platform. The four "lecture" courses can be taken individually. But if you pay for all of them, along with a capstone project course, and pass all of them, you can earn a specialization in GIS.

Nick Santos, Geospatial Applications Researcher and Jeff Loux, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Science, Agriculture and Natural Resources & Associate Adjunct Professor are the instructors.

The specialization is in partnership with Esri and uses its software. Esri's David DiBiase described the company's participation this way:

At their request, we’re helping UC-Davis to provide no-cost Student licenses of ArcGIS for Desktop.

The specialization includes five courses:

1 Fundamentals of GIS
2 GIS Data Formats, Design and Quality
3 Imagery, Modeling and Applications
4 Geospatial and Environmental Analysis
5 Capstone: Geospatial Analysis