This unit was reviewed by Alan Jenkins, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK.

This unit is part of the NCGIA Core Curriculum in Geographic Information Science. These materials may be used for study, research, and education, but please credit the author, David J. Unwin and the project, NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience.  All commercial rights reserved.  Copyright 1997 by David J.Unwin

Your comments on these materials are welcome. A link to an evaluation form is provided at the end of this document.

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Unit Topics and learning outcomes

• This unit outlines:
• What is meant by the term curriculum and how it differs from a syllabus
• Various curriculum design methodologies
• The problems that GIS can create for curriculum design.
• Educational motivations for using the laboratory method in teaching GIS
• Problems in establishing GIS laboratories

Intended Learning Outcomes

• after completing this module, students should be able to:
• define a curriculum as a system of inter-related parts
• state why designing a curriculum solely by content is not always best practice
• outline some formal approaches to curriculum design
• list some of the problems to curriculum design posed by GIS
• design a GIS curriculum for you and your students
• justify the use of the laboratory class in a GIS curriculum
• relate this use to the overall aims and objectives of the curriculum in which it is embedded
• list and evaluate some of the published laboratory resources for teaching about and with GIS
• outline the problems that will emerge in setting up a GIS laboratory and the necessary resources to overcome them

Instructor's Notes

Table of Contents

Metadata and Revision History

1. Introduction

• Defining and delivering an effective curriculum is THE most important professional responsibility for GIS instructors.

• GIS instructors in higher education have shown an almost exemplary concern for teaching. Concern for education in GIS goes back a long way (see Goodchild, 1985; Poiker, 1985).

• Concern and care for education in GIS has been a major factor in allowing the technology to diffuse so rapidly into geography and related sciences as well as into industry and commerce.

• Several published examples of possible syllabuses (Nyerges and Chrisman, 1989; Unwin et al., 1990) The original NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIS (Kemp and Goodchild, 1992) was one of the most ambitious educational projects ever undertaken in geography in higher education. Unusually, it was subject to careful evaluation and assessment through individual case studies (Coulson and Waters, 1992) and overall user feedback (Kemp, 1992; Kemp and F.M. Goodchild, 1992). Nobody, least of all its originators, would claim it to be perfect, but it gave a 'kick start' to many educational developments. More recently, the methods used in the development of a European GIS curriculum in GIS and the resulting curriculum content, have been described by Kemp and Frank (1996).

• The Proceedings of a number of international workshops concerned with GIS education. Almost all of the major conferences include a `stream' relating to GIS education and training.

• The GIS community has produced many general teaching resources. Examples include a number of, low-cost, systems that run happily on basic hardware (see Fisher, 1989), some very useful vendor training products, 'general awareness' computer-based tutorial systems, and some carefully designed packaged 'distance learning' materials making use of standard GIS (Langford, 1991). There are also a number of useful analogue videos (Hall & MacLennan, 1990).

• Increasingly, these materials are being made available to anyone who has access via WWW. A good place to start a search for these materials is:
• the UK Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Geography, Geology and Meteorology site at http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/cti.
• the NCGIA site at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/cctp/ncgia.html or
• that at Edinburgh University in UK at http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/gishome.html which list a very large number of GIS related sites.

• Many curriculum design issues remain unresolved.

• There is no single correct answer. GIS curricula will vary, for example, by:
• Level and student background
• Delivery mechanism
• Intended outcomes
• Instructor preferences

• There is thus a responsibility to design the GIS curriculum correctly to suit local circumstances, resources and student needs. Sample curricula can help, but a more general approach is to develop methodologies for curriculum design. An analogy we might use is between specific computer programmes (curricula) and the more general idea of programming languages (the methods and toolkits used).

2. Curriculum as a system

• There is no clear, accepted definition of the word curriculum. The dictionary definition is a course of study, but this gives little away and educational theorists invariably give a much wider definition that includes:
• Explicit statements of ideology underlying the instruction (why are you teaching it, and why is the teaching the way it is?
• General long-term aims (what are students intended to gain from following the course?
• Specific, testable, short-term objectives (what will they be able to do as a result of following the course?)
• Resources to be used (what is needed to deliver the course?)
• The delivery methods to be employed (how is it to be taught?)
• Timing of the units and their sequencing (when is it to be taught and in what order?)
• Assessment procedures and the balance of assessments to be made (how, when and why will it be examined?)
• A methodology for evaluating how well the course has been received (how will the instructor acquire feedback from the students about the course?).

• A curriculum is more than a course title and list of topics or even set of lecture notes. These constitute a syllabus and this is only one component of a curriculum.

• A simple model of the curriculum sees it as an interacting system made up of aims and objectives, assessment and evaluation (not the same thing), teaching methods and content (Gold et al., 1990):


see figure 1.

• The implications of this system view are:
• Because changes in any one of these elements will force changes in all the others, curriculum design is a complex and difficult process, similar in many ways to the development of a software system. A commercial GIS is very similar to a curriculum. Both have a high intellectual, conceptual and technical content, but note how differently they are usually produced. More often than not in higher education the curriculum is the work of a single individual or small team following no clear design methodology, often under extreme pressure of time, and with no process documentation on the way. A large team following a formal design methodology will produce a commercial GIS and documentation will form a very important part of the process.
• For completeness, all the elements defined above should be considered and present.
• In theory you could start at any point in the system and begin to design the curriculum, what matters is that all the elements and their linkages are known.

• As an exercise, think through how these approaches might be used in a practical curriculum design.

3. Curriculum design methodologies

• GIS curricula should be designed and there are a number of formal models of the design process (see Gold et al., 1990; Chance and Jenkins, 1997) that are surprisingly similar to those proposed in software engineering Some questions to ask are:
• Why is the course being taught?
• What new knowledge, skills and attitudes do I expect my students to develop?
• If so, what experiences do I need to provide for them?
• Will all students benefit from the same experiences?
• What range of experiences is possible?
• What resources are available? What am I comfortable with, and what would I like to experiment with?
• How will I know if the course is progressing as intended?
• How will I know if it succeeds?

• How can a curriculum design be guided? Gold et al. (1991, Chapter 10) recognise six possible approaches:

3.1) Design through aims and objectives or intended learning outcomes

• This is the equivalent of a top down approach to software development. It starts from a clear statement of broad educational aims, refines these into a series of explicit and testable objectives, and then devises teaching strategies, content and assessment methods to meet these aims and objectives. As with software engineering, so most of the relevant educational literature tends to favour this approach.

• An educational AIM is a broad statement of the overall motivations for the course such as to develop an understanding of the theory behind GIS and to develop skills in the application of GIS to problems in environmental management. In contrast an educational objective is a precise statement written in such a way that it easily translates into something that can be assessed in some way such as to understand by a practical example the basic principles of semiautomatic digitising.

• Educationalists recognise a taxonomy of educational objectives. Bloom's taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) has six major categories from knowledge, through comprehension, application, analysis and synthesis to evaluation. The ordering of these categories is intended to be broadly hierarchical, each measuring a more complex behaviour than its predecessor and also subsuming it.

• The difficulty of specifying aims and objectives (for an extended discussion see Beard, 1970, pages 44-71) has led many educationalists to argue that it is better to specify a series of intended learning outcomes (ILO). Examples are provided at the head of this, and all the other, units in the Core Curriculum. The key is to specify something that the student should be able to do after following the course. For example, the aim we used above might translate into an ILO such as 'after completing this module, you should be able to use a semiautomatic digitiser to input and structure basic vector data in the ARC/INFO GIS system'. Notice that this is very easily converted into a task that students would have to complete in the laboratory. Without such a laboratory exercise, the same ILO might be 'after completing this module, you will be able to state how line data on a map can be captured for input into the ARC/INFO GIS using a semiautomatic digitiser'. At a higher level in the taxonomy of objectives, students might have an ILO which asks them to take an evaluative view 'after completing this module you will be able to list the advantages and disadvantages of semiautomatic digitising related to raster scanning as input for line data into the ARC/INFO GIS'.

• For more information on how to write ILO, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/education/curricula/giscc/units/format/outcomes.html

• The advantages of both aims and objectives and ILOs are that they:
• Communicates teacher's intentions clearly and unequivocally
• Provide an immediate framework for course structure and content
• Guide the selection of appropriate teaching and learning resources
• Help both evaluation and assessment.

• The major problem with this very formal approach in which everything is written down in advance is that once started, it is hard to change tack, possibly as a response to student feedback on the course or changing circumstances.

3.2) Design by subject matter

 
• An obvious way to design a curriculum is to write down a set of topics that will be taught. Many instructors (e.g. the NCGIA Core Curriculum itself) have started at syllabus and content, specifying WHAT should be taught and then gone on to consider all the other elements. This is a content driven approach to curriculum design and this approach is the one that has necessarily been taken by almost all the published examples in GIS. This is an approach that software engineers would recognise as bottom up. There are at least six reasons why this approach should be modified:

Research evidence shows that syllabus content is not what most influences student learning. It is the precisely extra components that turn a syllabus of topics into a curriculum, such as attitudes to study, assessment tasks and so on, that most define what they ultimately remember and use in later life.

• A published syllabus may actually hide the real content. Educationalists also talk of the importance of an 'hidden' curriculum and various departmental cultures. These form a hidden agenda of implicit demands, which may run totally counter to the explicit syllabus. In practice, assessment in the form of the examination questions set often reveals this hidden curriculum, which is why the study of past examination papers is such a useful student revision method.
• Content dates rapidly. What is currently fashionable in research is often ephemera, to be replaced very rapidly by other materials. This is particularly likely to be the case in a rapidly expanding field like GIS.
• Course content always undergoes a series of pedagogic transformations on the way from teacher to taught which filter and transform it. Thus the real 'content' of a course can be defined in several ways. Is it what was originally intended should be taught, what was actually delivered, what was added to this by teacher/student interaction, what the students actually wrote down, what they remembered, or what they took from the course into the world of work?

C = what it was intended to teach.
C1= what actually was taught
C2= what the students actually wrote down
C3= this content after modification by the students additional work and interaction with others
C4= this content as it was remembered and reproduced
• Notice:
• Each transformation will be noisy.
• The absence of any clear feedback loops.
• Designs which build up in this way can be perfectly rational (the NCGIA example!) but there is a tendency for designers to lose sight of the overall course structure when using this approach.
• These two approaches are the most common, but Gold et al (1990) recognise four other possible approaches:

3.3) Design for power

• It may well be that GIS course designers are not totally free to design as they see fit. In many countries the GIS teaching might be part of some specified national, even international scheme in which others have specified many aspects of the curriculum 'in power'. An example is where the instruction is part of a professional development or continuing professional development scheme such as those operated by some of the professions.

3.4) Design building on teacher motivations

• A seemingly radical approach to curriculum design that may be far more common than instructors like to recognise is a design, which simply builds on the motivations, experience and interest of those delivering the course. Purists will argue that this will give an unbalanced view of GIS, but there are several arguments in its favour. First, the instructor will be knowledgeable and enthusiastic and hence teach 'better'. Secondly, this enthusiasm may well be transmitted to students who respond by working harder and with greater commitment. The final result could well be a better experience than that of a course given by instructors less at ease with the material and less enthusiastic. This type of curriculum at BA/BS level often leads good students directly into Graduate School, but this is likely to be a some cost in general awareness of the field for those who do not.

3.5) Design for resource availability

• Given that there is a large number of GIS education resources such as machine tutorials, CD-ROM, WWW sites, published pencil and paper exercises, text books and vendor instruction manuals it is possible to design a curriculum that builds on these resources. In USA, it is relatively common for introductory classes to be based very closely around a standard, specified course text. There is a different tradition in UK, but the logic of this approach is beginning to be more widely accepted. It has the advantage of providing a clear 'map' of what is to be covered and in what sequence, allows students time to work on the materials out of class and thus reduces the number of steps in what above was called the pedagogic transformations.

3.6) Student centered design for individual needs and knowledge.

• Finally, and possibly the most challenging approach of all, student-centred design that begins by an examination of individual student needs and attempts to provide course materials to meet them. The problem with this model is that only seldom do educators 'listen to the learner' and, even if they did, it is by no means clear that students would have a correct perception of the field. The student's learning environment is a complex one that includes far more than just the formal programme of instruction. It includes interaction with other students, browsing the library, talks with parents, and so on. It should be apparent that this approach must recognise that students adopt very different learning styles, so that what is good for one may be totally inappropriate for another.
• The importance of feedback and critical evaluation. These six approaches to curriculum design are theoretical models. Any one of them is unlikely to be followed in its entirety, either as a 'top down' or as a 'bottom up' system. In practice, almost everyone will chose a middle out strategy that designs by refinement of a central core of materials that most probably already exist. The important point is that there is a design and that all the elements of the curriculum system have been thought about.

4. Some dilemmas for GIS curriculum design: GIS and the curriculum

•  In common with many new technologies, GIS has a number of characteristics that make formal curriculum design difficult:

• Speed of development.
• GIS has evolved very rapidly relative to the speed at which developments can possibly be incorporated into curriculum structure. This has had a number of consequences. Until recently, it has meant that there has been a shortage of faculty/instructors able to teach about it. Normally, in education there is a reasonable supply of qualified educators willing to enter into it. These instructors are able to draw on models of curriculum practice based on their own experiences or have a background in research and applications that leads to a pretty clear idea of what should make up a curriculum. None of these conditions is met in GIS education.

• Education or training?
• GIS is usually introduced as a technology or an industry that is technology driven, yet it rests on top of many years of work in spatial information science (SIS). This 'education or training' debate permeates almost all the curriculum. It clearly must influence the overall aims and objectives, but it also affects the modes of delivery and the content that is offered. The dilemma is to choose between education in the concepts of SIS and training in the use of a specific system. In part this is to do with the levels of skill needed for a variety of possible future involvements with GIS, from operative to system designer (see Toppen, 1992 for a typology of GIS careers). No single curriculum could hope to meet all these requirements.

• GIS or xIS?
• where x can be S (spatial), L (land), M (Management) or even a redefined G (geoscience). There are a number of different conceptions of the field of GIS, depending on the background and prejudices we bring to it. For better or worse, the use of the word 'geographic' has meant that responsibility for education in GIS has mostly rested in academic Departments of Geography. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because many of the antecedents of GIS, such as computer-cartography, remote sensing and spatial analysis, were firmly located in the same place and have remained so. It is a weakness because many of the technical underpinnings of GIS (geometry, data base management) are difficult to teach in the same context. Again, no one single approach can hope to meets all these needs. From a curriculum design point of view, it is doubtful if anyone from a purely geographical background is able adequately to balance the material that goes into the curriculum or to specify educational aims and objectives that fully address what a complete education in GIS should provide.

• Breadth or depth?
• For a full education in GIS, students need the breadth of vision to understand not only the scientific and societal problems to which it might be applied, but also the complex managerial, legal and ethical questions that might arise from this use. At the same time, they must also have the depth of understanding to be able to play what Douglas once referred to as the 'hardball' version of GIS (Douglas, 1988). In the hardball version it is necessary to know about and apply concepts from data base management, computer programming, and so on, to real world problems with the inevitably 'messy' data. In his view, teaching students about the use of GIS using a 'filled' raster system is essentially playing the 'softball' variation, 'played on a smaller field, with a larger, more easily handled ball ... designed for summer camps and picnics where everyone can take part'. There is nothing wrong with softball, provided we do not pretend that it is hardball. and this is not simply a question of curriculum content. Most of the basic concepts of GIS are capable of being dealt with either as a shallow concept or in depth. For example, raster storage, regarded by Douglas as softball, can equally be approached at a depth, which is distinctly 'hardball' (see for example, Samet 1989). Balancing breadth against depth may well be the most important curriculum design problem of all.

• Hands on or hands off?
• In producing a curriculum for GIS, it is almost certain that students will need to access as powerful a system as is possible within the usual budgetary constraints. Although desirable as an end in itself, 'hands on' has some unfortunate consequences, which are discussed in the next module of this section on Teaching and learning GIS in laboratories.

• Option or integrator?
• A fifth dilemma concerns how we relate GIS to the rest of whatever curriculum we happen to teach. At least two models are possible:
• GIS is a sub-set of some other discipline, to be taught as an elective within the context of a course in some other 'real' discipline. The difficulties that this view is creating for academic geography can be seen in the interchange between Taylor (1990), Openshaw (1991) and Goodchild (1991). The obvious weakness of this model is that it tends to generate teaching in breadth rather than in depth and risks marginalising the entire enterprise.
• GIS is a cover set integrating materials from parts of several other disciplines into one distinct science of spatial information that is worthy of study in its own right.

• About GIS or with GIS?
• Finally, although a lot of people are teaching and learning about something called GIS, far fewer seem to be teaching with it, that is, using GIS better to teach some other discipline (see Thompson, 1992).

5. Conclusion: What does a good curriculum look like?

• Designing a curriculum for GIS is not a simple matter and there is no single 'best' answer either in the form of the curriculum or even the methodology adopted for its design. A final question we might ask is whether or not it is possible to determine if the result is any good. One way is by always including a careful student of the course once it has been given. Evaluation of this sort is essential and should always be treated seriously, allowing sufficient time in class for any survey questionnaire to be filled out and with the results carefully summarised. It is good practice to post a notice giving the results of the evaluation and providing an instructors commentary.

• Is it possible to anticipate whether or not the curriculum meets its aims? One simple test to apply makes use of the set of guiding principles of good education proposed by the American Association of Higher Education (Chickering and Gamson, 1987). According to these a good curriculum should:
• encourage staff/student contact
• encourage co-operation between students
• encourage active learning
• provide prompt feedback on performance of both teacher and taught
• emphasise `time on the task'
• respect the diverse talents and ways of learning brought to the course by the students
• evaluate itself
• display a clarity of aims and objectives
• make use of the educational literature.

• The golden rule seems to be always to remember that WE ARE NOT JUST TEACHING GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS BUT WE ARE ALSO TEACHING STUDENTS.

Evaluation

Citation

David J. Unwin, (1997) Curriculum Design for GIS, NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience, http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/units/u159/u159.html, posted January 08, 1998.