(720) DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING AN ONLINE TECHNOLOGY COURSE: AN ADVANCED GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS) ONLINE COURSE

摘要

Teaching Geographic Information Systems (GIS) courses online offers certain unique challenges.Faculty is tasked with transitioning a traditional lecture with lab sessions to the online environment,with all its affordances and limitations. The labs, integral to student success, require access tospecialized software;;large amounts of data with which to work;;a variety of media and techniques;;and a significant amount of supervision, feedback, and engagement from the instructor while movingfrom one module to another. The student final project integrates their learning from the semester into asingle set of problems and solutions.This paper presents experiences and observations from transitioning a lab-intensive face-to-facecourse to a fully online course. The course, entitled “Advanced Geographic Information Systems”, wasselected for development as part of a competitive fellowship offered through the Office of OnlineLearning, University of Georgia, US. Since the course was offered before on-campus, in a traditionalface-to-face setting, the course design was modified to be offered online and implemented through theUGA Learning Management System, elcNEW powered by Desire2Learn. The software for the GIScourse is ArcGIS 10.0, with student licenses provided by ESRI (Environmental System ResearchInstitute).Recent experiences from other universities offering introductory GIS courses (e.g. Penn StateUniversity) have been successful, and indicate that not only are these courses attractive to the onlinelearner, but also, and perhaps surprisingly, that the online learner can benefit from affordances of theenvironment. This paper is intended to provide a summary of methods that proved to be effective inthe design and implementation of the course, along with the student's perspective, from a courseevaluation conducted at the end of the course.