EOM June 2005 > Departments > News Story

New Institute Begins Courses In Geospatial Sciences

Matteo Luccio

The goal of the NASA grant was to generate courses that could be offered by any institution in the world. These institutions would license the courses from IAEGS and list them in their own catalogs. One advantage of this system is that it avoids regional accreditation problems. In January the first 10 courses were ready. Texas A&M University offered one course and used it as a text book, Cornell University used the instructional material as a supplement to its own courses (in an effort to test its effectiveness as an instructional medium), and Saint Mary's University of Minnesota offered the courses as a stand-alone, sole means of instruction.

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All of the courses and related materials are fully online and exploit the Web to its fullest extent. Just the first 10 courses include more than 1,200 animations. In particular, the IAEGS program provides support for the use of math online by converting each equation and formula into an interactive animation. Students can compute values based on the formulas and try out different combinations or sets of values.

The application contains a modified Microsoft Windows IE browser and a portal window. The Web links in the browser launch the animations in the 3-D portal; portal events, in turn, can load related Web pages. This allows users to simultaneously view and work in two different environments. The 3-D portal allows users to simulate real world actions, such as moving around a virtual space to collect Ground Control Points. One of the main goals of the project is to implement multi-user interaction in the virtual portal that involves virtual classrooms where students can interact with other students in the virtual world and in chat spaces.

The system uses click-stream technology, originally developed for business applications, to monitor every click by every student, as they make their way through the courses. Surprisingly, Lawhead told me, "this turned out to be pedagogically very useful," as it helps the course authors and institute staff refine the materials and presentation.

The system provides students an advanced navigation tool bar that allows and encourages them to traverse the content of a course in a way that best matches their style and pre-existing knowledge. Students can skip previously mastered content and pre and post quizzes help them manage their path through the course material and insure subject mastery.

Faculty members submit materials in whatever format they choose, including paper and pencil sketches, and an in-house team converts them to XML code via a streamlined process that it has developed. Finished course materials use 3D graphics and animations, streaming video, simulations, virtual reality, text, equations, adaptive communication technologies, and intelligent software agents to present concepts and ensure that students understand them.

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Individuals can take the IAEGS courses too (as I plan to do). Interaction with faculty is left entirely to the discretion of the institution offering the courses. "You could take one of the courses and never speak to a faculty member," Lawhead told me. A rural community college in Mississippi "could offer these courses with minimal faculty assistance," she added, stressing that her team "worked really hard with the delivery mechanism," so that it could approximate as much as possible person-to-person interaction. "We are not denigrating the role of the faculty — we just cloned them," she quipped. I asked Lawhead how this project compares to MIT's OpenCourseWare program to put course materials online. "This is that on steroids," she answered.

Originally, IAEGS targeted two- and four-year colleges and universities. Then, however, they found out via ASPRS that an even bigger clientele would be businesses and government agencies.

While the initial implementation had a few glitches — mostly related to server access issues because the institute lacked a direct connection to an Internet backbone — the system is now running smoothly, according to Lawhead. "We just had Sun Microsystems here all week to fine tune our servers and install a firewall," she told me. The reviews from the students enrolled via Cornell, she added, were "really positive."

Lawhead hopes that this project will soon become self-sustaining, allowing the institute to update every course about every two years and add new courses as needed. The next improvement in the pipeline is the conversion of the courses into modular units, allowing students to mix-and-match units from different courses, to best suit their training needs.

Lawhead emphasizes that the money from NASA allowed her team to explore new ways of delivering educational material and develop "a whole new course creation mechanism." In the process, they published almost 30 technical papers on various aspects of the technology. Lawhead hopes to use this mechanism later, with funding from other government agencies, for other subject areas. "Each time I show this, people are knocked over dead."

James R. Plasker, executive director of ASPRS, told me that his organization realized early on that the NASA grant that IAEGS had secured "was going to be a huge infusion of capital into our field of expertise" — and that IAEGS had a limited expertise in remote sensing. So ASPRS offered the institute access to its membership.

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In January 2002 ASPRS, through its Education Committee, assembled a "blue ribbon panel" (the group of 16 people mentioned by Lawhead) to advise the institute on modules, prerequisites, courses, etc. ASPRS then began advertising the project and the availability of the fellowships to prepare the modules. It also provided experts for additional review panels over the years. "Since then," Plasker told me, "we have helped promulgate [the project] within the geospatial community, in Congress, and at NASA, and supported it as needed." The institute became a Partner in Education with ASPRS and has exhibited at ASPRS meetings. Overall, according to Plasker, "it's been a very good relationship" and the two organizations have achieved together much more than they could have had they not collaborated.

Following President Bush's decision that NASA should head for Mars, the agency refocused its efforts. In the process, it took $12 million out of Mississippi. IAEGS lost about two years of funding and one and a half years of time. However, ASPRS, which had just given an award to Sen. Lott from Mississippi, explained to his staff that Congress and NASA might be de-funding IAEGS and helped to extend the time and cut the loss to only the last two years of the budget.

Now, Plasker points out, it is essential that IAEGS be able to maintain the course material, or the whole investment will go to waste.

Professor Thomas M. Lillesand — who teaches and conducts research in the Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies Environmental Remote Sensing Center, the Department of Forest Ecology and Management, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — was one of the first ASPRS members to help out with IAEGS. He helped conceive the curriculum and course outlines.

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Lillesand sees the IAEGS courses not as a replacement for traditional ones but as complementary. Among the great advantages of the online delivery of course materials over traditional printed textbooks, he told me, are the unlimited use of color and the extensive use of animation, some of it in 3D. For example, one of the animations shows the orbital path of a satellite and images of Earth beneath it. "As a text book co-author I feel as if I were in a candy store" in this digital environment.

The courses encapsulate the knowledge and instruction of several people who might not write a textbook, Lillesand told me, but who have chosen to participate in the project. Another advantage, he points out, is that students — many of them mid-career professionals — can take the IAEGS courses on their own schedule. Additionally, the courses give students feedback premised on their understanding of the material.

The long-term impact of the IAEGS courses, according to Lillesand, will depend largely on their marketing, their delivery, and the response by institutions — but it has "the potential for being quite dramatic."

The current members of the institute's advisory board are:

• Dan Civco, University of Connecticut
• Allan Falconer, George Mason University
• Chris Friel, GIS Solutions
• George Hepner, University of Utah
• Roger Hoffer, Colorado State University
• John Jensen, University of South Carolina
• Tom Lillesand, University of Wisconsin
• Carolyn Merry, Ohio State University
• Stan Morain, University of New Mexico
• Ahmed Noor, Old Dominion
• Vincent Tao, York University
• Lynn Usery, University of Georgia, USGS
• Randy Wynne, Virginia Tech

About the Author

Matteo Luccio is the editor of Earth Observation Magazine and of GIS Monitor.