This course places you in the role of GIS professionals who can work as GIS consultants, geospatial specialists/analysts, or GIS entrepreneur. Because we are from very different background and experiences, it is a great opportunity to integrate individual’s interests and expertise in some group-based problem-solving tasks. Different from teaching you specific skill or software as those in a regular semester, this course aims to facilitate you to take a problem-oriented perspective and motivate you to seek solutions. Thes solution can be new discovery, scientific finding, or a practical solution such as an App. Instead, you make use of your learned skills, integrate them with your teammates while explore new ones, with the goal of providing partial solutions or knowledge for supporting spatial decision making in specific fields such as environmental health, tourism, business, marketing, or natural resources, just to name a few.
In this block course, you will be in two roles. The first role is a scientific researcher or developer to work on a topic that interests you or a small group. It can be topics related to your thesis research or related to your own interests. In this role, you will work to carry out a project. This can be something related to your thesis, your interest, or something you want to implement. Throughout the course, you are expected to become a critical thinker, a problem solver, or a scientist who can turn raw data into understandable knowledge for a particular field. Your second role is a founding member in a small GIS start-up company. Hopefully 3-5 students can form a team and compete in a realistic setting: A potential client (not so ordinary as) is looking for geospatial solutions to help their organization. Each team will be working on their plan through four guided assignments to brainstorm potential solutions (NO implementation required). Hopefully, your sales pitch (business plan) can stand out of others. For each assignment, you will have worksheets to brainstorm and create your plan in different phases.
Throughout this course, the instructor will lead you through the critical steps of a project (either for publication or not for publication) and of your sales pitch with brainstormed ideas with provide materials and exercise. We can treat this as teamwork.
- Lehrende/r: Jonathon Little
- Lehrende/r: Angela Schwering