SpatiaLABS 2013: Across the University

Just about a year ago, in advance of last year's Association of American Geographers meeting, Esri announced SpatiaLABS, a set of lessons aimed at universities. The product, which aligns well with a university site license is sold as a separate service, with its own annual fee. I wrote about SpatiaLABS last year and was disappointed that learning objectives were not included. I also wondered if the small fee was worth the trouble for Esri to administer.

Last month, Esri released an update (press release). The positioning is a bit different this year:

Designed for disciplines across the entire university, SpatiaLABS 2013 Edition complements and enhances an instructor's course with geospatial investigations. The computer-based lab sessions, published by Esri Press, build students' spatial reasoning and analysis skills.

This time the focus is less on GIS (and perhaps GIS and geography departments or departments managing a site license) and rather on getting GIS used across campus and across the curriculum. That ties in well with the vision Esri Education Director David DiBiase offered in this presentation, one that injects spatial thinking and GIS into more traditional college courses.

The updated collection include 64 lessons including some "sexy" topics such as Sea Level Rise and Storms on Manhattan, Customer Profiling: Demographic and Lifestyle Segmentation. The topics cluster just as the previous version did: 29 independent topics, 19 for business, and 16 for forestry. The lab datasets are mostly U.S. based.

The press release does not indicate that learning objectives were added, nor does it detail who wrote these lessons. I did find the list of authors - on the SpatiaLABS "topics" page. The authors are 12 university faculty members. The license fee is not noted in the release, but is based on the nature of your organization. It seems the fee is the same as last year ($500/year/enterprise license); a tweet from @barbareeduke noted that GIS Etc. offers a 10% discount: $450. 

Esri hosted a webinar last April which details the history of the package and answers attendee questions. And, SpatiaLABS is on twitter, @spatialabs.

My Take

I appreciate the effort that went into developing and adding to these labs. I wonder how widely they are being used. My guess (and fear) is they are being used in GIS courses for the most part and not yet creeping out to other academic programs. 

That is Esri's (and every geospatial educators') challenge: to push spatial thinking out of geography and GIS courses out into the curriculum. This set of resources is a great start. The next step? We need to turn to successful user institutions to tease out best practices that other institutions can repeat. Perhaps those will appear alongside version 3 of SpatiaLABS?

A Look at Esri's SpatiaLABS GIS Lab Projects

Esri announced the new DVD product ahead of this week's Association of American Geographers event in New York City. Per the press release:

SpatiaLABS from Esri Press are independent computer lab activities that introduce, enhance, and reinforce spatial reasoning and analytic skills that apply to a variety of disciplines. Students working with SpatiaLABS use mapping technology and visualization tools, including Esri's ArcGIS software, to solve real-world problems.

There are more than 50 labs on the DVD assigned to three different levels. Documents (intro material, cookbook instructions, bibliography) are delivered in Word format and can be edited as needed. From looking at the the sample labs (provided on the Esri Press website in online magazine format) the data for the labs are available free, online and on the DVD. The advanced level lab required access to Business Analyst Online. Educators are encouraged to host the DVD materials on a central server for students access.

The topics range from watersheds, to air pollution, to urbanization to natural hazards to disease outbreaks, with several clumped in the business and forestry areas. It's not clear from the press release or the website who Esri asked to write/contribute the lessons, but I suspect those details are on the DVD.

The offering is a service rather than a product and priced per year, per campus, per $25,000 of an Esri Educational Site License (if there is one). The cost is $500 per year, per campus, per $25k of site license for those with one or $500 for those without one.  New labs will be added annually for  institutions with a current license of SpatiaLABS.

My Take

I would like to see learning objectives for each lesson. These need not be linked to specific curricula or the GTCM, but would certainly help educators select lessons to fit specific courses.

I'd like to see a forum for feedback and suggestions for each lab. That may be in the works. I did see a tweet from an Esri Ed staffer asking for feedback on the product.

I'm curious how users of other software products might use these resources. It think it'd be valuable to ask advanced students to tackle one of these projects using a "new to them" GIS platform.

I'm curious if the $500 price tag will stick. It's seems like too much work to extract this small fee from schools already paying for a site license. On the other hand, if the writers are not Esri staffers and these fees encourage and pay for contributors continued enhancement of the existing projects and efforts to write new ones, I'm all for it.