Development and operation of GIS exercise materials for undergraduate students

Abstract

Since around 2000, GIS researchers in Japan have collaborated to provide materials for GIS lecture classes for university undergraduates. As a result, a GIS core curriculum, a Japanese version of GIS Body of Knowledge (BoK), and a series of PowerPoint presentation files were developed. These materials are online and available to anybody with free of charge. However, they have not yet published free-access online materials for GIS exercises using software and spatial data. Therefore, we launched a new project in 2015 to produce such materials. The learning topics in the materials were selected based on products from the previous projects. Software packages used for GIS operations are free open-source ones. The materials have been provided as open educational resources with a Creative Commons license on the GitHub platform. The materials were used in a university class of GIS exercises to verify whether they are effective for undergraduate students. In this paper, we introduce the developed materials and show the results of their applications.