Reuse and sharing of e-Learning courses in GI Science education

This improves:

• Quality of teaching material.
• Access to international GI know-how and new topics that the receiving institutes could not offer to their students by own resources.
• Virtual mobility of teachers and students across seven European countries.
• Re-use of resources already invested in e-Learning (personnel and finances) by a good practice organizational model for sustainable and future-oriented exploitation.
• Implementation of the Bologna process by international cooperation of European GI institutes, based on the existing networks.
• E-Learning of non-GI institutes by best-practice examples.
  
  

Approach

Eight European GI institutes use existing courses and adapt them to the requirements of the e-Learning course exchange. Each partner contributes one course, to be taught on a non-profit exchange basis with the partners. We use the e-Learning platform of ISEGI-UNL, Portugal, successfully providing an e- Learning Master Program in Geographic Information for more than three years. Previous work in the ALFA project eduGI.LA [4] developed a prototype for the e-Learning course exchange and evidenced feasibility. The organizational framework for execution and recognition of students’ achievements was prepared by the cooperation of the eduGI.net [5] consortium.

We foresee the development and exchange of the following 8 e-Learning courses: Project management, GI standards, Advanced Geospatial data mining, Data acquisition and integration, Visualization,
Geographic data bases (advanced), Virtual excursions in Earth Sciences, and Ontology. Each partner provides a course, typically to two partners of the network with 15 students each. Standards are, for
example, English language, 90 hours workload, 13 online contact lessons, supervision and exams executed by the providing GI institute.

Our vision is to exploit the organizational framework and the created e-Learning courses by the establishment of a common, virtual GI Master Program in Geoinformatics. We will disseminate our concept of sharing and reuse of resources by best-practice examples to non-GI communities.

Expected results

• E-Learning platform established.
• Organizational framework for exchange established.
• E-Learning courses (test versions) online.
• Test version courses executed.
• Quality assurance executed by test results of executed test versions.
• Final versions of e-Learning courses provided.
• Exploitation plan and project evaluation report written.
• Dissemination activities (homepage, paper submissions, eight e-Learning workshops) executed.