The Virtual Geography Department Project (http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/virtdept/contents.html) offers one possible model for building collaborations and interoperability in GIS education. It is a project begun at the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 under a grant from the US National Science Foundation. Its goal is to develop a discipline-wide clearinghouse for high-quality instructional materials in the Worldwide Web. Summer workshops funded by the grant have been used to bring together almost one hundred geography faculty to discuss, plan, and develop materials in many different subfields. So far, "working groups" have been formed, in Cartography; Introductory Human Geography; Cultural Geography; Physical Geography; Earth's Environment and Society; Urban and Economic Geography; Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, and Statistics; Virtual Fieldtrips; History and Philosophy of Geography; and World Regional Geography and Area Studies. Each working group is being sponsored by a different department with members sharing plans and materials under the guidance of volunteer leader. Stress is being be placed on curriculum integration through the creation of on-line syllabi, texts, laboratory exercises, field activities, and resource materials that will be of service to instructors in each working group areas. The project will link existing materials already available on the Internet but, more importantly, attempt to develop a plans at the subdisciplinary level for the creation of new Web-based materials. In some ways, the project mirrors the specialty group organization of the Association of American Geographers. Indeed, the grant has led to the creation of a new specialty group which will help to coordinate the development of such resources more widely within the discipline. This specialty group will help to sustain the momentum of the project once NSF funding ends in 1999.
This sort of clearinghouse arrangement is suited to the sharing of instructional materials among individual instructors, particularly short, ephemeral exercises and tutorials that may not otherwise be published commercially or distributed outside of a single department. These are "packaged" using standardized cover pages that include an abstract, table of contents, facts of publication, and instructor's notes. This way, instructors wishing to use the materials can gain a ready overview of each exercise or tutorial. This packaging could be readily adapted to the IMS scheme.
This sort of clearinghouse arrangement is not without its weakness. Though contributors gain some limited credit and recognition for their work, as they do for publishing conventional research articles and instructional materials, they receive no direct monetary compensation for their efforts. At the same time, no single contributor needs to bear the burden of producing more than one or two exercises for the clearinghouse itself to succeed. In the long-run, a clearinghouse arrangement for sharing some instructional materials might be used in parallel with pay-for-use training services offered by vendors such as ESRI or on-line distance education programs like UNIGIS.