For any nascent technology, the education system works through its own learning process with how to properly teach the fundamentals and best-practices in how to apply the science (or art) to real-world applications. The use of GIS, spatial analysis techniques, and mapping technologies has spread immensely over the past 10 or 15 years – and has particularly grown in the last five or so.

From my perspective, let’s review what I’d consider the “good”, the “bad”, and what I think is missing from the education system’s approach to teaching GIS.

 

(Photo: mrpattersonsir)

The Good

One of the things that formal education systems can do, most times better than learning in a business environment, is give the student an appreciation for the array of disciplines to which the science can be applied. In the case of GIS education, the tools and techniques can become crucial components of fields like urban planning, surveying, forestry, anthropology, finance, epidemiology, law, engineering – there’s hardly an application to which geospatial analysis would not be an asset. Higher education is particularly suited to giving the student a higher-level perspective on how to apply their science to a diverse range of other sciences. In the geography program I was part of, it was always a pleasure to see students from the surveying department or soils research in the geography lab learning about GIS and remote sensing software.

The Bad

While the university system is proficient at spreading the knowledge of geospatial technology to other areas of study (or maybe those areas are pushing their students to GIS?), I still feel that there’s too much focus on the theory, with not enough focus on real-world problem solving. Of course learning the fundamentals and theories is critical to understanding how to apply the techniques effectively, but there still exists a gap in understanding for most recent graduates with how to take the theories and address a real problem factoring in issues encountered in practice – things like lack of quality data, time management, technology costs, interoperability of data and results – all of these concerns crop up daily as a practitioner of GIS, but are sort of “out of sight, out of mind” in many educational environments.

Geography classes also tend to focus too much on the “physical”. There’s coursework in other specializations (human, economic, medical, social), but these other applications of the principals should be more comprehensively included across GIS, remote sensing, and the rest of the geography curriculum.

What’s missing? What can be changed?

Here’s a short list of things I think need to have a better presence in GIS education, in no particular order:

• Promotion of technologies for software developers – Throughout my experiences in geography education, there was essentially zero mention that one could apply software development or programming knowledge to solving geospatial problems. But being in the GIS community nowadays, there’s tremendous opportunity for those with development experience to work in the GIS arena.
• Open source, open source, open source – Anyone working with lots of different GIS technologies today will tell you that there is a wealth of great open source technology out there (heck, there’s a whole conference devoted to it), few of which the typical graduate has any knowledge of, let alone experience using. Things like QGIS, PostGIS, GRASS, GDAL, and on and on. These are all extremely powerful tools that are mostly glossed over in favor of the industry-standard Esri suite of products. This needs to change!
• Web mapping – Although getting familiar with web mapping technology starts to venture into the realm of the software developer, an exposure to at least the fundamentals of how produce and display maps and data in web browsers would be invaluable for the up-and-coming GIS professional. If I had had TileMill when I was in school learning GIS, I would’ve been using it non-stop, everyday!

With a few alterations to how GIS is taught in the classroom, I think young GIS professionals could be much better prepared to enter the workforce with a more diverse set of tools in their arsenal. What’s your take on how GIS is taught? What else could be changed or improved?