Solutions

UNIGIS

DRAFT by Derek Reeve

UNIGIS is an international network of universities which together offer a post-graduate diploma and MSc in GIS by distance learning methods. Our students complete ten modules each of which covers a substantive GIS topic in order to gain their diploma. They may then choose to write a dissertation to qualify for an MSc award. There are no examinations, the students being assessed via the assignments that they return for each module. Contact is maintained with students primarily via Email, although telephone and fax support are also available to them. Students can elect to attend up to three workshops during their studies, but some students choose to complete their studies purely by distance methods. Further details of our programme are provided on our Web site - http://www.unigis.org.

The UNIGIS programme has been taught from the UK since 1991. We already have, therefore, considerable experience of delivering GIS education to distant students and in the context of the present meeting would offer the following observations :-

The Instability of the Web for teaching purposes : There is already a large amount of GIS material on the Web which can be used for teaching and, indeed, within UNIGIS we are increasingly finding that we refer students to Web sites where previously we might have referred them to journal articles. There are, however, significant problems at present with using the Web for teaching. The quality of material is not guaranteed, there being no equivalent of peer review on the Web. The continuing availability of material is not guaranteed - it may be that the great site upon which you've based your lecture may be taken 'off the air' by the site owner tomorrow. The legality of linking materials from Web sites into ones own pages sometimes gives one pause for thought - do many academics actually understand the copyright implications of using Web material?

If the present discussions can lead to a situation in which GIS web-based materials are classified according to their origins, contents, quality, longevity, etc and clarifies the conditions under which they can be used by teachers, this will represent a major advance for UNIGIS and all other similar programmes.

The Need for a sustainable business model : Much of the material on the Web is freely available and there has so far been a laudable ethos that the Web is an arena for sharing knowledge. Visitors to the UNIGIS site, however, will find that most of our materials are behind a password which is available only to our students. The reason for this is, quite simply, that we have no choice - UNIGIS is our business. We have to generate income by selling our materials in order to support our operation.

Once teaching via the Web becomes a mainstream activity of other institutions, they too will need to consider how to charge for their materials. Within the UNIGIS network we have evolved a system of royalty fees and concept payments which allows those sites which originate materials to receive a return for their effort whilst giving other sites access to materials which they could not themselves have generated. A similar pattern of fee payments will need to be generalised and incorporated into interoperable Web based teaching systems.

If a secure business model can be developed for publishing web educational objects, then it will very probably be in the interests of UNIGIS to bring its materials 'in front of the password' and to offer them generally on the open Web market. Such a Web market would then also allow UNIGIS to buy-in from other providers modules which we cannot generate internally. We can see great potential benefits in the establishment of a proper mechanism for fair exchange of materials via the Web.

The importance of cultural differences : As an international network we have learned at first hand the need to be sensitive to national differences. Although GIS is often regarded as a technical subject, it is of course embedded in national contexts. At present our UNIGIS materials have been authored primarily in the UK and so our non-UK sites have the task of customising these core materials to fit their local circumstances. We know that this local customisation process is not a trivial task. One wonders how the process of local customisation will be achieved within an interoperable online environment.

The importance of national differences extends beyond concerns about content. National circumstances also affect the appropriateness of particular delivery mechanisms. In the UK, for example, our students retain a possibly exaggerated concern about the costs of online study if they have to pay their own telephone bills. In other countries in which we have students, web access is still extremely restricted. In Ethiopia, for example, there are only 60 modem connections available for the entire country. In some countries, the Web and Email remain forbidden.

It is possibly inevitable that, at least initially, that interoperable GIS online education will actually be available to students if they speak English, understand about Tiger files and Ordnance Survey data, and can afford the necessary technologies and fees. We should hope, however, that quickly such education will become multi-lingual and multi-cultural.

Avoid 'hi-tech' (or 'the joy of paper') : Discussions with our students reveals that many of them would find an educational experience which tied them continually to their computer unsatisfactory. Many of them actually study away from their computers - we had one student who completed his diploma in minimum time by studying our materials on the train during his daily commute into and out of London. Although we are increasingly using the Web as a mechanism to deliver our materials, we know that many students will subsequently print-off large portions to study off-line in the traditional manner. This will restrict the levels of interactivity which we can build into some of our materials.

Our experiences suggest that the authors of interoperable GIS educational objects will generally need to have a realistic model in their minds of the manner in which their materials will be used by students, and may have to temper their enthusiasms for the latest plug-ins and other hi-tech gismos by a knowledge of the level of equipment which is likely to be available to students. At the very least, a statement of the resources needed to use an educational object should form part of the metadata associated with it. So, our experiences with UNIGIS convince us that it is certainly possible to deliver high quality GIS education by distance, and increasingly online, learning methods. We look forward to the emerging 'interoperable' education era as a welcome development and extension of our activities and will wish to contribute strongly. We are aware, however, that there will be difficulties to be resolved along the way.

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