Progress and Reflections of International Cartographic Education

Abstract

With the development of geospatial information science and technology and applications in numerous areas, cartography and geospatial information education is becoming increasingly more important in training graduates equipped with new capacities. Cartography and geospatial information education are crucial to cartography and geospatial information science, as a discipline and a profession. The contents have always gradually been changing, as well as corresponding effective approaches to deliver sustainable and resilient education. In the new normal era of post COVID-19, summaries and reflections on the progress of available practices and theories can support better design of effective and quality education. In this paper, the conference papers and abstracts on educational topics published in the last 10 International Cartography Conferences are used to trace the path that educators in cartography and geospatial information have gone through. Bibliometric analysis is conducted on educational topics, authors, and regions. A domain term knowledge map is drawn showing that the number of publications on education in the International Cartography Conferences has been increasing. The geographic distribution of authors is very concentrated, with authors from European countries contributing about 50% of the publications and those from the top ten countries contributing 60%. Works in many other regions are less reported. The research topics are mainly focused on undergraduate and graduate education in geographic information systems, secondary education, education atlas, learning theories, learning environmental design, online education, etc. Pedagogies and experience of distance learning and online education in the last 20 years have been well applied. However best practices of online and distance education are rarely reported to support effective new normal education in the context of COVID-19 pandemics.