Course description
This course places students in the role of GIS professionals who are responsible for collecting data, retrieving information, and transferring these data and information to knowledge using various geospatial technologies. This transferred knowledge is particular to address specific societal needs such as tourism, business, marketing, or natural resources. This course utilizes a systematic approach leading students in organizing their learned geospatial knowledge, identifying geospatial problems, learning emerging geospatial technologies and tools, and disseminating their findings professionally as a necessary practice to prepare them for their future careers.
In particularly, Students in this course will work closely with the instructor to identify a spatial or societal problems that interest them as their case studies. They will then work in small groups and use the open sourced, citizen science project developed at IFGI called Sense Box to familiarize themselves with the collection of data in the environment, followed by the organization, visualization, and analysis of those collected data. As an option, students will be introduced to technologies such as the new Apps Builder introduced by ESRI to develop their own cross-platform web applications to disseminate their findings. At the end of this course, students will deliver their findings in the format of oral presentation. They will be graded on both oral presentation and their written reports of their developed projects.
Course objectives
As a course offered after students have taken advanced-level courses in the master curricula of geospatial technologies, students will use this course as a practice to develop a project that assemble their interests and learned skills. This course’s specific objectives are:
1) Critically identifying and understanding problems that exist in the geospatial and related domains (e.g. tourism app with real time information of temperature);
2) Understanding the necessary steps of planning, organizing, executing, and finalizing a project utilizing geospatial technologies (e.g. steps involving Sense Box);
3) Proposing a project that demonstrate the students’ capability of understanding of above aspects (e.g. identifying a spatial or societal problem that the students can design tools to address);
4) Successfully implementing project with geospatial technologies to address particular research questions (e.g. designing and integrating data collected from Sense Box or retrieved data);
5) Disseminating research results in both written and oral formats professionally.
Course schedule
This course will start with lectures to orienting students with related theories, technologies, and information. Then seminars requiring students’ participation will take place as the phase of spatial problem identification. During the implementation period, the instructor will be in the role of assisting students by demonstrating necessary software and technologies, as well as seeking solutions to particular group’s problems. Student’s demonstration of their project will take place at the end of this period.
The course is recognized with 5 credit points consisting of 60 hours of classroom hours and 90 hours of students working on themselves/in groups.
- Lehrende/r: Rui Li
- Lehrende/r: Angela Schwering