Abstract
Abstract. During the remote learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, university GIS students did not always have home access to the kinds of software and hardware that they would ordinarily get in their on-campus lab facilities. In this situation, the free and cross-platform nature of FOSS opened the door for some students to continue their GIS education uninterrupted. In this article, I describe how one university allowed students to choose FOSS such as QGIS, PostGIS, and GeoDa as alternatives to proprietary software in upper-division GIS coursework. These were used to teach techniques such as point pattern analysis, visibility analysis, hydrological modeling, proximity surfaces, LISA analysis, process modeling, open data access, and data summation. I share specific software tools, commands, and plugins used to apply these techniques in lab assignments. I discuss how these approaches can form a lasting part of the GIS curriculum beyond the pandemic, and how students can position these FOSS skills as they prepare for the GIS job market.
Highlights
1.1 Advantages of FOSS for remote learningBy its nature, free and open source software (FOSS) allows for much flexibility of deployment, including cross-platform support, minimal hassle with licenses and invoices, and the ability to standardize on a version without vendor-forced upgrades
Proprietary geographic information systems (GIS) software skills remain in high demand in the US job market (Hibdon et al, 2019), supplementing a GIS education with FOSS skills offers major advantages for students
In QGIS, some of the necessary features for the course assignments were in the Processing toolbox by default, while others needed be added via plugins
Summary
Free and open source software (FOSS) allows for much flexibility of deployment, including cross-platform support, minimal hassle with licenses and invoices, and the ability to standardize on a version without vendor-forced upgrades. These benefits have made FOSS attractive to governments, industry, and non-profits (Raymond, 2001; Shaikh and Cornford, 2012) They are especially useful in the online education environment where students use a great variety of home computing environments to complete their lessons and exercises. This article describes how a regional teaching university in the United States used these advantages of FOSS to expand access to geographic information systems (GIS) courses
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
