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Aarthi T. Chandrasekar and Vikas Mishra Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, IIT Powai, Bombay - 400 076, India Email: pvenk@csre.iitb.ernet.in Introduction Benefits of harnessing the new developments in high technology areas like space technology and information technology for sustainable development have been well recognized and many developing countries are looking towards assimilating these technologies as part of their developmental plans. Satellite remote sensing integrated with GIS technology provides a tool for addressing the issues of spatial reference in enhancing the quality of life and sustainable development. India is one of the developing countries, which is undergoing radical changes on the socio-economic front. The administrators and planners understand the need for efficient planning and optimal resources management. They are aware that Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System technologies can play a vital role in urban and regional planning, resources monitoring and allocation and environmental management. India is one the few countries in the world, which has made remarkable progress in space technology. India has launched a series of operational remote sensing satellites providing high quality remote sensing data to several parts of the world. By integrating remote sensing and GIS methodologies, India has carried out a number of operational projects at national level in the areas of resources planning and management. In response to rapid developments in computer hardware, graphic display systems and spatial theory, GIS technology is achieving wide spread popularity among the administrators, managers, line department personnel and academia. The inevitable accompaniment of such extremely rapid growth of technology is considerable shortage of trained manpower at all levels. Especially in the case of GIS technology, the problem is so acute that many organisations do not come forward to implement GIS technology just because of the shortage of skilled manpower to handle their systems. India has taken a few steps to introduce GIS and Remote Sensing as a subject in the undergraduate and graduate level degree programs in a few universities. Still the required number of skilled manpower is very high. The requirement of GIS education has shown over the years that there are three categories of people who have to be exposed to this technology. The first level deals with people who are administrators and decision makers who have to get a general awareness of the potential of GIS technology. The second level categorizes to the personnel from user departments who must understand the conceptual basis of GIS operations and analysis. Third level deals with technical manpower that will work in the systems and implement the applications in GIS environment. The main hurdles in imparting GIS technology are the technical complexity of GIS concepts and the compulsion to work in a computing environment. Although public investment in GIS research such as the Regional Research Laboratories in the (U.K.) and the National Centre for geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) in the (U.S.A.) has added to the pool of skills there is still a considerable unmet demand for GIS education. (Raper and Green, 1992). In this context, we find now that several new technical books written by eminent authors and self-learning demonstration tools built around commercial packages are available to strengthen GIS education. This article illustrates the development of a multimedia based GIS tutor, the structure adopted, the contents covered and the hands-on exercises provided around GRAM++, an indigenous software package. Development of GIS Tutor One of the early GIS tutors was ARCDEMO developed at Birkbeck College, London, U.K. (Green, 1987). This demonstrator worked around Arc/Info GIS package and illustrated the capabilities of map editing, projection changes, map overlay, buffering and network analysis. Map Analysis Package MAP (Tomlin, 1983) was one of the earliest simple GIS tools demonstrating the raster based techniques in GIS. Many enhanced versions of MAP were released subsequently. IDRISI (Eastman and Warren, 1987) developed at Clark University, USA provided simple techniques to handle raster maps along with tutorials. IDRISI became one of the best training tools internationally for raster based GIS with recent upgrades to Windows platform. With the availability of PC based GIS packages in the Nineties, vendors started releasing self-learning demonstrators around commercial GIS products. The first comprehensive computer aided learning tool for GIS was created in the Department of Geography, Birkbeck College, London, U.K. (Raper and Green, 1989) and was named GISTutor. This tutor ran standalone on a PC without the need for a full fledged GIS package, presented an overview of GIS functions, provided illustrations through animations and had a flexible structure for all types of users. Detailed descriptions of GISTutor version I and II are given in (Raper and Green, 1992). GISTutor II is a hypertext based system allowing a user to explore a series of linked screens of information covering the basic and advanced topics. A review of GISTutor II has been given in (Stuart, 1995). Geocube 1.5 is one of the well-developed GIS tutors in Frace by Michel Bernard at SIAGE SABM, and Frame and Phillipe Miellet at Ted-Aliter in 1996. It provides an interactive introduction to GIS and gives a clear understanding of GIS technology. GeoCube is an application developed with Tool book version 3.0 hypermedia authoring system. (Tool Book is a product of Asymetrics Corporation and a run time version of Tool book is provided along with GeoCube.) GeoCube runs on MS DOS and Windows. The topics are categorised under Geographic Information, GIS functionality, GIS Implementation and GIS Technology. GeoCube is very well organized with graphical illustrations, icons and help functions. Clicking on a cube and moving it along the panel to a desired level can control the speed of the illustrations and animations. Some of the texts contain hyperwords, which are highlighted. By clicking on them one can get detailed information on these words. The hypertext approach used in GeoCube provides a framework in which a range of tools can be used to create dynamic teaching material to educate users about GIS. Geocal is a Windows based GIS tutor developed by Roy Alexander and group at CIT, Centre for Geography, Geology and Meteorology, Dept. of Geography at the University of Leicester, U.K. It is a good tutor for the beginners in the field of GIS. The tutor comprises four units - Introduction to GIS, GIS for utilities, GIS for business and GIS in agriculture. The number of illustrations and examples are very few but self-explanatory with hypertext links for detailed information. After every unit/subunit a simple quiz is provided on important aspects of the topic. Introduction to GIS is given in detail but the other three application units do not provide complete understanding of GIS capabilities.
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