Solutions

The ESRI Virtual Campus and Knowledge Base

The Virtual Campus

The current campus offers a series of six interactive on-line training courses in ArcView GISâ . The first course in the series is free. Students may purchase the other courses individually, or as a complete series. Additional courses will be offered in an expanded version of the campus this summer. The expanded version of the campus (available in August 1998) will provide additional courses and a new student interface. The on-line materials will be presented in a separate window running alongside ArcView GIS on the user's PC (a time locked edition of ArcView GIS software is available for downloading to those who subscribe to an entire course series.

The course template will include the following sections:

• Introduction - an overview of the course to follow, orientation advice, details of hardware and software requirements, and navigation instructions.

 
• Content - each course consists of multiple lessons, expected to take about 2-4 hours. A standard set of components is used to create content (although these may be grouped in different ways). For example, Lesson 2 in the new course titled Basics of the ArcView 3D Analyst uses the following components to structure the lesson content:

 
• Goals
• Topic 1: Navigating in a 3D scene
• Concepts: Rotating in a 3D scene; Zooming in a 3D scene; Panning in a 3D scene; Refreshing a theme.
• Examples: Finding hawk’s nest
• Exercise: Navigate a 3D scene

• Topic 2: Using the viewer control bar
• Concepts: Identifying themes; Selecting features; Selecting graphics; Saving a scene as an image.
• Exercise: Identify and select features

• Topic 3: Managing data
• Concepts: Copying and deleting files
• Exercise: Manage grid and TIN data sets
• Summary
• Self-test
 
The structure and presentation of the material in each lesson allows students to follow a variety of learning strategies. A sequential path can be taken through the material, or the student may prefer to attempt the exercises first, visiting and re-visiting concepts and examples as they feel necessary. These options are facilitated by hyperlinks between material. In addition, the system will re-start at the point where a learner exits, preventing the need to repeat early steps in a lesson.

Other features designed to assist the learner include:

• clickable graphics leading to further details (to allow the delivery of multimedia materials and address problems faced with download speeds)
• links to illustrations and results at various stages of exercises to allow the learner to check progress
• challenges at the end of exercises to help reinforce learning.
• self-tests that re-direct learners to the part of the lesson where concepts were first explained when mistakes are made.
 
• Exam - a random set of questions drawn from the self tests in each lesson (based on a model proposed by the exam designer) is presented to the student at the end of each lesson. These lessons are graded on-line.

The Knowledge Base

ESRI plans to use third party authors to assist with the creation of content for GIS concepts, examples, exercises and other materials. The authoring program uses a business model that will allow external authors to receive royalties when their materials are used in the Campus. With contributions from a wide range of individuals it may ultimately be possible to include course components that are videos, games or other resources beyond thos developed by ESRI. Thus, a tutor in Belfast might design a lesson incorporating concepts written by a Professor in California, a game written by a team in Manchester, and a 'real world' example from a telecommunications company in Hong Kong.

Applicability to interoperable education

The Knowledge Base takes the opportunities for interoperability in GIS education to a new level. The database of GIS concepts, examples, and exercises, structured into 'bite-sized' components ready for re-combination to meet the needs of a particular tutor, seems to offer an attractive model for the management and use of interoperable course content. Where materials do not fit into the Knowledge Base database directly (for example a game or video), information about where these can be obtained could be included instead. In addition, the system is broadly IMS (Instructional Management System) compliant, thus the content in the Knowledge Base could be linked with other systems for the management of instructional materials.

There are a number of challenges that need to be addressed by the Knowledge Base:

• The system is still under development, and has not been fully tested by external authors.
• There is an urgent need to populate the Knowledge Base with appropriate material. Where will this material come from? One possibility is the revised NCGIA core curriculum - however, this is not complete. Another possibility is to allow individuals to contribute - in this case how can the quality of material be assured?
• For the structuring of interoperable materials, is the ESRI model of lesson components, particularly the granularity of this model, appropriate? Can alternative levels of granularity - e.g. at the lesson level - be supported? At present, the Knowledge Base does allow authors to develop their own components, so this may not be a problem.
• To achieve widespread use amongst educators the Knowledge Base will benefit from alternative explanations of concepts and examples to address different cultural and application contexts. As an example an alternative explanation could be used by learners seeking to improve deficiencies highlighted by self-tests (re-direction to the original concept that they did not understand the first time, may not be the best way to improve learning!).
• Motivating learners is always a challenge, and it remains to be seen whether the Knowledge Base and the Virtual Campus will deliver a product that can continue to delight learners throughout a course of lessons. While it is still too early to say, the use of the Virtual Campus by a wide variety of students from around the world might indicate that the answer to this question is 'yes'.
• The delivery of materials over the WWW may also be an impediment to widespread use of the resources in educational settings, although there are plans to release the new campus on CD-ROM to allow for off-line use.

Websites

ESRI home page http://www.esri.com
Virtual Campus http://campus.esri.com