TEACHING GIS AS AN UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR SUBJECT
Mark Gahegan and Bert Veenendaal
Curtin University, Australia
Curtin University has been offering a full undergraduate
degree in GIS since 1992 and diploma since 1988. Rather than
offering a minor in GIS, to support a major in geography or
surveying, we offer a major in GIS, with the options for
students to study a minor in a related discipline, including
geology, geophysics, urban planning, environmental biology,
etc.. This offers some distinct advantages- graduates have
enough in-depth knowledge to work as developers of
computational tools for the geosciences. It also raises some
challenges; firstly with respect to the teaching of the
underlying geographic principles and secondly with respect
to student awareness. Whilst our graduates are in very high
demand (each student can currently chose from two or three
jobs) we still face a problem with recruitment, in that few
school leavers (and school careers advisers) have any idea
what GIS is. Consequently, we have set up a 'roadshow' and are
keen to be associated with any education initiatives in this
area.
An overview of the currently offered course is presented,
along with a detailed discussion of the rationale and some of
the problems that have been overcome on the way.
Presentation format:
For paper presentation or possibly for panel discussion. Need overhead projector and a slide projector.
Mark Gahegan
Dept. of Geographic Information Systems
http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~mark/
Department of GIS, Curtin University
PO Box U 1987, Perth 6001
Western Australia
email: mark@cs.curtin.edu.au
tel: +619 351 3309
fax: +619 351 2819