From GIS Monitor
A three-year effort to develop a set of online courses on geospatial sciences recently came to fruition as the Institute for Advanced Education in Geospatial Sciences (IAEGS) unveiled its first ten courses. Funded by NASA for a total of about $9 million, this effort represents the largest infusion ever of training and education money into the geospatial community. IAEGS expects to have seven more courses ready by mid-July and another 10-12 by the beginning of October. The courses cover such topics as digital image processing, aerial photography, and geospatial data synthesis and modeling.
Figure 1: Click on image to see enlarged.
Dr. Pamela Lawhead, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, is the institute's director and Parishweta Bhatt is the institute's associate director of projects. Lawhead told me that the project originated with a challenge grant from NASA's Earth System Science Division (now called the Applied Sciences Directorate) at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
According to the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), 175,000 people are employed in the United States remote sensing and geospatial industry and the industry is growing at the rate of 9 to 14 percent every year. Yet, according to Lawhead, not enough people are graduating every year from the few available geospatial programs to meet the need for their skills. That is why NASA initially funded IAEGS out of its workforce development budget.
"We were challenged to create the online courses and the delivery system," Lawhead told me. As a computer scientist, she was particularly interested in the latter. However, "we found that we also had to build a curriculum." So she asked ASPRS for help and gave it a small grant. The association convened a panel of about 16 people, mostly senior faculty in the field. They met at a hotel in Washington for a day and wrote course descriptions. They then brought these descriptions home, wrote full outlines, and prioritized them. From these outlines, IAEGS issued RFPs for courses, selected the three best submissions for each course, and awarded each winning author $80,000 to prepare his or her course — a task "essentially like writing a book," Lawhead says.
While the content of the IAEGS courses is "standard," according to Lawhead, what is new is the overall curriculum and the technology IAEGS developed to deliver the material. She characterizes the curriculum development as "historic," as only a few universities had previously attempted this.