Abstract
While free and open source software becomes increasingly important in geospatial research and industry, open science perspectives are generally less reflected in universities’ educational programs. We present an example of how free and open source software can be incorporated into geospatial education to promote open and reproducible science. Since 2008 graduate students at North Carolina State University have the opportunity to take a course on geospatial modeling and analysis that is taught with both proprietary and free and open source software. In this course, students perform geospatial tasks simultaneously in the proprietary package ArcGIS and the free and open source package GRASS GIS. By ensuring that students learn to distinguish between geospatial concepts and software specifics, students become more flexible and stronger spatial thinkers when choosing solutions for their independent work in the future. We also discuss ways to continually update and improve our publicly available teaching materials for reuse by teachers, self-learners and other members of the GIS community. Only when free and open source software is fully integrated into geospatial education, we will be able to encourage a culture of openness and, thus, enable greater reproducibility in research and development applications.
Highlights
Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement of science
We are currently experimenting with the open source presentation framework Reveal.js to see whether it is suitable for our lectures
We are planning a new course solely dedicated to the important role free and open source software (FOSS) plays in science and how open science perspectives can lead to new geospatial solutions in research and decision making
Summary
Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement of science. Scientists need access to all tools used in published research to fully reproduce and verify results and conclusions. By requiring open source software, data and access [4], open science approaches ensure that scientists have access to the same methods, data and code used in a published study Open science perspectives, such as open access and open data, are being increasingly adopted in research, but free and open source software is surprisingly less reflected in universities’ educational programs, despite its wide adoption in industry [5,6]. We begin with an overview of newly-developed educational concepts and the associated online resources for courses in geospatial analytics at North Carolina State University (NCSU). These courses combine FOSS GIS and proprietary GIS to emphasize general concepts and techniques in geospatial science [16]. We conclude with a discussion of our experience offering open science education, and we outline future directions for moving the field forward
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