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Web Based EO/GIS Education And Training Opportunities And Challenges With Referancerto Indian Scenario
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I V Murlikrishna
Ph.D, FIE, MIEEE
Professor and Head
Centre for spatial information technology
Jnt university, hyderabad 500 028
Email: iyyanki@icorg.org
1. Introduction
The major constraint of EO/GIS education and training in India are inadequate exposure of GIS and lack of a comprehensive syllabi identified for this purpose. EO/GIS educators are often faced with the challenge of ensuring the trainees and students are adequately equipped to deal with real world problems encountered in the professional field. GIS Students come out of university with very little knowledge of the real world issues they are going to have to face. This holds true regardless of whether the student graduates from undergraduate or post graduate level. The issues topical in the current GIS community may be introduced in lectures, tutorials and even practical sessions but it has no utility unless the significance is fully recognised by the students. Added to this university systems have not fully understood the relevance of the technology. At this time the GIS is clearly getting sharpened into 2 distinct domains/schools with a little overlap. One is application GIS with little emphasis on databases and Information Technology materials and a completely Information Technology Driven/aligned GIS. The former category produces GIS users/ analysts and the later category produces developers/programmers. Now the EO/GIS education becomes much more relevant because it is no longer a data conversion technology. Now we identify a new discipline called spatial information technology interfacing GIS, computer science, communication technology, surveying and mapping, remote sensing and softcopy Photogrammetry. The GIS education is no longer relevant unless it gets IT enablement. In this background the online or web based EO/GIS education scope and related issues are worth discussing.
2. Web as the enabler:
The online education and training market is booming the world over. The key contributors for this are the premier companies (fortune 500 companies) who will be spending large amounts on knowledge management within their organisations. The other key driver for growth would be mid career professionals. They will be interested in reskilling themselves. According to Peter Ducker, the growth in education and training spending wont be in traditional colleges and universities, but instead, would be ramped up by web enabled training. The GIS education and training in the country is not organised. Much needs to be done in the background. The discussion on web based education and training is relevant for India because the issues are different in Indian context. In general the use GIS educators are often faced with the problems encountered in the professional field of web for GIS training is expected to reduce the deficiencies caused due to some of the factors mentioned earlier in this paper.
3. Web Internet for GIS lectures and exercises:
Let us have some understanding of what do we expect as benefit from using web technology in GIS education? Of course one of the main advantages is that everybody who has a PC and an Internet connection can access the material and work done with it at home. But the intension is not to offer a course/tutorial for the students to repeat the subjects of the lectures at home-in addition to the lectures, the main benefits of this new technology compared to print media like lecture scripts or text books is the possibility to link relevant information to each other by using Hyperlinks and using graphics and other Multi Media features for animation etc.
It may be understood here that some of the advantages mentioned are not really caused by Internet technology but by the Multi Media capabilities of Internet technology. That means some of these advantages can also be obtained by computer based training and not only by web based training. But in an Internet environment we can realize a solution using very cheap and commonly used techniques and tools. This point is very important especially at universities.
Many models of Web-based training exist. Generally they can be categorized as synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous Web-based training refers to "class-room events in which students and instructors are physically separated but working together at the same time". Asynchronous Web-based training refers to "a structured learning experience presented on a computer and in which the instructor and the learner are separated by both time and space. In the Asynchronous model, individual learners directly interact with the computer to proceed through the courses at their own pace. An example here is ESRI Web-based training was designed to be self-paced asynchronous training, which can be accessed anytime and anywhere as long as the learners have an Internet connection. Asynchronous Web-based training does have its challenges. To design and implement a successful asynchronous Web-based training is a complicated task. It has many challenges.