next up previous
Next: The Evaluations Up: News from the Educational Previous: The Labs

The Materials are Freely Available

All of the materials created so far have been packaged and are accessible via the website, in the hope that other individuals and institutions will find them useful. Perhaps an instructor will want to present a single module to complement an existing course; perhaps several modules might serve as the centerpiece of a new course. Individuals may find that they can quickly learn the basic concepts that they need to perform an analysis of their data, or that they may discover innovative and unusual ways to approach problems similar to their own.

At present, some of the lectures have only been summarized. With time, all the lectures will become on-line mini-courses, completely self-contained units, which instructors will embellish and enrich with class discussions and additional materials of their own.

The labs are available for the use of all, as mentioned above. We actively seek user comments on the labs, so that we may improve them for both our students and for others using the site. Should you encounter problems with them, we will be glad to help solve them.

In addition to the lectures and labs, we make several other resources available. For example, we created a simple game to illustrate the concept of spatial autocorrelation, based on a paper by Griffith[4]. We also have provided a simple WebGIS demonstration, based on the public-domain GIS GRASS[3]. Each lab/lecture (i.e., each module) has a series of links associated with it, gleaned from months of surveys of the internet, as well as a set of readings.

One of the end products of the course that may be the most useful is the presentation of student projects. Students were encouraged to apply the methods and concepts studied in class to their own data (if possible), or to data in which they had some underlying interest. They wrote a paper and presented their analysis to the class, for the most part as PowerPoint presentations. Most of these presentations (those which do not contain proprietary data or feature as-of-yet unpublished results) have been transformed into web pages, which are accessible to all.


next up previous
Next: The Evaluations Up: News from the Educational Previous: The Labs

Andrew E Long
Thu Jun 17 13:23:17 EDT 1999