GeoForAll History

Markus Neteler moved that a "Education and Curriculum Committee" be designated to create and promote educational and curriculum material. This motion was accepted at the Fifth Board Meeting. See Education Contributors page for a list of contributors.

Mission

The project aims at creating and promoting educational and curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide appropriately licensed material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects. The committee seeks strong cooperation with academic research projects.

The Education Working Groups page lists focus areas for the committee.

The Educational Resources page will list and describe materials for educators.

The OSGeo in Research page discusses the research outreach.

The Core Curriculum Project page contains the initial brainstorming data.

Objective

Do

• Promote the free and open source alternatives in education.
• Develop the appropriate pages in Wikipedia.
• Develop an "Intro to open source GIS" course that could be offered as a distance-learning class.
• Collect links to free educational materials that advance the goals of OSGeo.
• Create installation packages for class-room teaching and distance learning courses. Work with Distribution Special Interest Groups
• Develop teaching materials (labs, tutorials, datasets, self-learning packages) that are aligned with existing curricula and courses.
• Develop HOWTO's for educators and students, e.g., "This task can be performed with GRASS this way, this one with mapserver this way", etc.
• Get involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions.
• Develop pre-prepared curricula utilizing open coursework and tools that could be used by teachers in their own classes.
• Compile a FAQ with answers for educators.

Possibly Do

• Develop required know-how for an OSGEO-CE (OSGEO Certified Engineer). Note the work being done by The GIS Certification Institute. Work with Certification_Committee
• Develop phased coursework (short, medium, and long term).

Concerns

Several of us felt that that "Core Curriculum" might be confusing. "Education and Outreach" or "Educational Outreach" were deemed more appropriate.

Leave certification to The GIS Certification Institute

Certification is a topic for another OSGeo initiative.

Collaboration

There is overlap between this committee and the Promotion and Visibility Committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet.

We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the Public Geospatial Data Committee for our data needs.

Link with the Geodata Packaging Working Group to work on educational datasets.

Need input from commercial organizations, such as Geo-Consortium, as some of them may have already developed curriculum material.