OSGeo Educational Project

There is a possibility to get funding for an OSGeo educational project. This page is for brainstorming and developing the proposal. The proposal should be only few pages, describe the general idea of the project and contain a set of separate but coordinated components. From each of these component projects we should be able to produce a more detailed, but also only a few pages long, description, if asked.

The General Idea

Develop open geospatial courseware for universities, which build on free and open source geospatial software and on free data sets.

The courseware consists of

• installation packages of selected software that are readily usable in typical university settings
• two kind of data sets
  • those that are usable over the internet using standard protocols
  • those that are downloadable from the internet
• teaching and self-study kits that can be used in courses

Coordinator

The project needs have one coordinator, who is the leader and responsible for whole project.

Questions:

• Who will take this position?

Component projects

Questions:

• What is would be an ideal size for a subproject?

Template for a component project

General idea:

Software used:

Target audience:

Responsible partner:

Deliverables:

Amount of work:

Introduction to scripting in geospatial tasks

General idea: Introductory course to using a scripting language for geospatial data management and simple analysis tasks

Software used: GDAL/OGR with scripting language bindings, scripting language (Ruby, Python or Perl)

Target audience: Graduate students in geoinformatics or related subject

Responsible partner: Prof. Ari Jolma/Helsinki University of Technology

Deliverables: 5~7 workbooks on the web (getting started, querying, measurements, transformations, ...)

Amount of work: ~1 year for developing the workbooks and preparation of the programming platform for easy adoption

Introduction to Remote Sensing for Natural Resource Management

General idea: Introductory 2 or 3 credit course on remote sensing methods for natural resource conservation using open source software and other freeware. This course will build upon curriculum already developed by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History (see http://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/index.php?section=wmaterial). The course will be co-developed and co-taught between staff at the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Software used: Requires some further investigation, but probably will utilize one or more of the following: GRASS, QGIS, Multispec, OpenEV, 3DEM and possibly others.

Target audience: Undergraduates, graduate students and conservation professionals.

Responsible partner: Ned Horning, American Museum of Natural History and Prof. Charles Schweik, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Deliverables: Set of course modules that will be licensed as "open content" and made available on the OSGeo educational program website.

Time required: ~1 year for development of modules and curriculum part time.