Prototype

This page is a prototype page for higher education modules. The UMass team is working on this page currently.

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Introduction

This page offers higher-education resources related to Free/Libre and Open Source Geographic Information Systems (Foss GIS). Others are welcome to contribute. Currently (see below) these materials are organized by course and by the main author or organization involved. Unless otherwise noted, these courses are offered as an "as is" basis and have not undergone any official OSGeo peer-review process. (See below section on "where we hope to go")

As this project operates within open content paradigm, we encourage educators, students and professionals to contribute to the project by adding new modules, by editing/updated new modules and by sharing new datasets. It’s important to add new “roadmaps” or new course outlines so other could use them as well.

Completed Course Materials (internal and external links)

Introduction to Free/Libre and Open Source GIS v.1.0

• This course, in its development, replicates the development of typical GIS project, from data development, data analysis to presentation of analysis of results. The course utilizes qGIS, Grass-plug-in and PostgreSQL/PostGIS as major GIS tools. The course was designed and tested in 2006-2007 and supported by UMass Team (C. Schweik et al).
• Level: beginners to intermediate users

Repository of modules

• All modules
• [lectures/ assignements/excercies]
• [by application area]
• [by software]
• [by level]

Where we hope to go

In the future, we hope to move this to a system that is more easily searchable, and is built around the modular concept, where each module/block is a complete unit, introducing some theoretical concept, GIS approach or software-related skill. Some OSGeo tutorial standard needs to be established, and each learning module should be classified by the skill-level of the target audience, as well as by application area, type of lessons, etc (refer to Table 1 for detail classification scheme). And while modules should be independent, ideally, each module would include a list of prerequisite modules and may also provide suggestions for relevant modules to explore after that. And these modules are independent and prepared by different people and organizations, they are compliant with each other (or with OSGEO EDU standards). We think the development of a kind of "module buffet" be available, where educators can utilize a sequence of modules related to their area and goals, as a “roadmap” and/or “skeleton” for their courses. In other words, the idea is to create an environment where educators can search and select modules that match their goals.