Implications and Saturation for the Administration of Higher Education Site Licenses

摘要

The purpose of this poster is to describe the administration of the educational license for Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), the largest geographic information systems (GIS) software company in higher education. ESRI's GIS higher education site license allows for unlimited use for teaching, research and administrative purposes throughout an entire university, school district, or state. Administration of unlimited users varies at each institution depending on the information agency responsible for local distribution of the desktop and cloud versions of software. The poster presents survey findings of the higher education site license administrators and outlines the factors associated with distribution, including type of software distribution, frequency of distribution, and the information agency charged with distribution on each campus, as well as the number of devices/downloads of service credits. In a world with ubiquitous location-based services via the Geoweb and location a key factor in many decisions, GIS software should be a standard part of any office software suite training for today's knowledge workers. The educational implications for faculty and students without GIS access are costly. The poster concludes and invites further discussion on why GIS, this earth processing system, is not as common in higher education computer labs as other common software suites.