Marien de Bakker
Van Hall Institute, The Netherlands
A GIS case-study is defined as real life problem studied with the help of a GIS, although many aspects of the problem may be simplified by the lecturer. It should give the students insight what GIS could do as a tool to answer certain (spatial) questions related to real life. But a case integrates also a increase of subject knowledge and GIS theory. Case-work will need in general more than 20 student hours. Some examples of cases (land-evaluation, soil pollution, nature-management, wildlife-management, environmental planning) used in a institute for Higher Education (in agriculture, environmental sciences and animal management) in the Netherlands are discussed.
The difficulties in developing cases (e.g. which materials); the educational aims (e.g. training in GIS software, mixture of GIS theory and practical work, the amount of theory of the chosen subject) and during the execution of the case for lecturers, students and lab-assistants (e.g. how to coach, the marking of the reports) are given.