Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
Geography
Publication Date
8-2021
Abstract
During the remote learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, university GIS students did not always have home access to the kinds of software and hardware that they would ordinarily get in their on-campus lab facilities. In this situation, the free and cross-platform nature of FOSS opened the door for some students to continue their GIS education uninterrupted. In this article, I describe how one university allowed students to choose FOSS such as QGIS, PostGIS, and GeoDa as alternatives to proprietary software in upper-division GIS coursework. These were used to teach techniques such as point pattern analysis, visibility analysis, hydrological modeling, proximity surfaces, LISA analysis, process modeling, open data access, and data summation. I share specific software tools, commands, and plugins used to apply these techniques in lab assignments. I discuss how these approaches can form a lasting part of the GIS curriculum beyond the pandemic, and how students can position these FOSS skills as they prepare for the GIS job market.
Recommended Citation
Quinn, S. (2021). Using Free and Open Source Software to Teach University GIS Courses Online: Lessons Learned During a Pandemic. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 46(4), 127-131. https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVI-4-W2-2021-127-2021
Journal
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
© Author(s) 2021.
Language
English
Comments
This article was originally published in The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.