|
Five
Questions for . . . David DiBiase
David DiBiase directs the Dutton
e-Education Institute at Penn State University. He is also
a senior instructor of geography and manager of Penn
State’s Certificate Program in GIS and Master of GIS
degree program (MGIS), both of which are offered online
through the University's World Campus. (For more
information, visit http://www.e-education.psu.edu/gis)
Penn State has already filled
its first class for its online GIS Masters, which was
announced just a few months ago. How should educational
institutions and industry read the demand for this level
of training?
There is plenty of evidence of unmet need for
leadership development in the geospatial workforce. It’s
somewhat surprising, therefore, that fewer than 20
professional masters degree programs worldwide specialize
in geographic information science and technology. The
problem is that few higher education institutions have a
critical mass of faculty members who have the breadth and
depth of knowledge to offer a comprehensive program that
responds to the needs of working professionals. Fewer
still have the capacity to serve a new clientele of
part-time adults at a distance in addition to full-time
graduate and undergraduate students in residence. We
struggle with capacity issues ourselves.
Meanwhile, impressive applications arrive from
prospective MGIS students at a rate of more than 100 a
year. It seems to me that there is room for others in this
market. I look forward to a day when many institutions
offer courses and programs online in a cooperative way,
perhaps mediated through some central clearinghouse,
allowing students and their advisors to design customized
curricula that meet students’ individual needs, and
their employers’, regardless of their location. Imagine
an amazon.com of GIS education. We could even have star
ratings! (I hope I’m retired before then.)
How, if at all, does the
“geography doesn’t matter” aspect of online
education impact the study of GIS, which is at some level,
the study of geography?
The most important advantage of “e-education,”
as we call online learning here, is that it allows
learners to participate “anytime, anyplace.” Everyone
has become so busy that convenience is no longer a luxury,
it’s a necessity. There is a geography of distance
learning, however. In fact, there are several: the
geography of Internet access, the economic geography of
students’ ability to pay for our services, cultural
geographies that affect attitudes toward technology and
education, and the geopolitical landscape that determines
who we can serve and who we can’t. These and other
geographies become more consequential as we expand from
national to international markets. In 2005 we plan to
begin offering some of our classes to partner institutions
in England. U.S. students in our MGIS program will also be
able to participate in courses delivered from overseas.
The more internationalized higher education becomes, the
more geography matters.
Is online education a natural
outgrowth of the Internet? Is it comparable to remote
education via live video or television? How does it
compare?
Penn State likes to point out that we’ve been a
distance education provider since the 1890s, when rural
free delivery made it possible to provide correspondence
courses to farmers and others who couldn’t participate
on campus. Long before the Internet, the Open University
very successfully used TV and ground mail to extend
learning opportunities throughout Great Britain. The first
distance learning program in GIS appeared in 1990 as a
correspondence program offered by a consortium of European
academic programs called UniGIS. What the Internet has
made possible is to integrate content delivery,
assessment, and communications among students and
instructors in a single user interface. Asynchronous
“threaded discussions” (like newsgroups) are
particularly important in facilitating group participation
without requiring people to assemble at any particular
place or time.
Is it possible to
“translate” a classroom course to the Internet? Or
should such classes be created from scratch to take
advantage of the medium?
We have an advisory board of industry and
government leaders who helped us identify learning
objectives for our adult professional clientele. Our
faculty members develop the courses from scratch in
consultation with instructional design specialists and
with our audience and medium in mind. We very consciously
avoid mimicking the classroom experience. For instance,
one of the most exciting advantages of e-learning is the
ability to break down the artificial distinction between
conceptual lectures and practical laboratory activities.
As many of your readers know, a typical GIS class
on campus consists of a couple of one-hour lectures each
week along with a two-hour lab session. Instructors and
students alike tend to struggle to make connections
between theory and practice. They are separated for purely
logistical reasons—classrooms designed for lectures are
poorly suited to computer-based labs, and vice versa.
Online we have the opportunity to weave conceptual
materials into practical exercises. Our students encounter
mini-lectures on concepts as they arise naturally in the
context of realistic problem-solving tasks.
How, if at all, do the online
offerings in GIS from the World Campus draw on the
existing faculty, curriculum, and mission of the on campus
Department of Geography and its college?
Like most academic departments of its kind, Penn
State’s Department of Geography is strongly oriented to
its traditional clienteles, which include undergraduate
and graduate students who study full-time on campus.
University promotion and tenure criteria encourage faculty
members to prioritize research productivity over education
and outreach. All of this leaves little or no excess
capacity to serve a new market of part-time adult
professionals away from campus.
To get our original World Campus Certificate
Program in GIS off the ground in 1998-99 we built a small
team of non-tenure-track faculty members who combined
real-world experience with strong commitments to customer
service. Now that we’ve expanded to a professional
graduate degree program we’re working hard to involve
our regular faculty. As we demonstrate success, getting
involved becomes more attractive. Two of our most senior
GIScience scholars have approached me recently about
developing online courses and seminars. I agree with our
university president’s prediction that the distinction
between learning on campus and online will become
increasingly blurred.
Back
|
