Applicants:

John Mackenzie, Associate Professor, Food & Resource Economics (attended January 1999 ITUE session)
Tracy DeLiberty, Assistant Professor, Geography (will attend January 2001 ITUE session)

Background:

A geographic information system (GIS) supports the development and analysis of digital models of geographic phenomena. GIS has widespread applications in natural resource analysis, environmental management, climatology, geology, demography, and other fields. We teach GIS as an analytic toolkit for formalizing geographic questions into testable hypotheses. Our objective is to teach spatial thinking rather than a specific GIS software.

We have taught undergraduate and graduate GIS courses in our respective departments, Geography (GEOG) and Food and Resource Economics (FREC), since 1994. Our current GIS course offerings are GEOG 471/671 Advanced GIS (DeLiberty), FREC 480 GIS in Natural Resource Management (Mackenzie) and FREC 682 Spatial Analysis (Mackenzie). Each of these includes hands-on experience with GIS software, and draws students from variety of environmentally-oriented academic programs at the University. Since an increasing number of students take GIS classes with both of us, we are working on coordinating our curricula so that these courses complement each other.

GEOG 471/671 (http://www.udel.edu/Geography/DeLiberty/Geog471-671) combine lectures on a series of topics (GIS design, spatial logic, data management techniques, etc.) with lab assignments using ESRI ArcINFO, including GRID and other extensions. Lab exercises cover UNIX and GIS software orientation, web resources for GIS, spatial data input and editing, image registration and spatial interpolation techniques. Topic choices for team projects include a land-use/land cover change analysis, a reservoir planning problem, analysis of the spatial distribution of off-campus student housing units in Newark, deforestation in the Amazon, and Amazon Basin precipitation analysis. The course includes two exams. The entire course curriculum—lectures, projects and supplementary reference material—is included on the course website

FREC 480 (http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/frec480) and FREC 682 (http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/frec682) are taught in computer labs, with lecture/demos followed by lab sessions. Both of these courses are entirely project-based. FREC 480 uses ESRI ArcView; FREC 682 uses GRASS, ClarkLabs IDRISI and (optionally) an ArcView spatial econometrics extension. FREC 480 lab projects include a demographic and land-use change analysis, habitat analysis for an endangered species, analysis of vegetation biomass densities from SPOT satellite imagery, and field experience with a GPS receiver. FREC 682 lab projects include a more complex habitat analysis, a platinum mining plan, Landsat image analysis, dynamic simulation of a pollutant spill, and spatial statistics (variograms, kriging and spatial econometrics). Each successive project is less structured, requiring students to formalize the stated problem and determine for themselves how to apply the analytic tools they have been introduced to.

FREC 682 was perhaps the first course at the University of Delaware (1995) to provide all course materials—syllabus, assignments, data, lectures, GIS software and manuals—on the web. (Its initial web presence predates www.udel.edu.) It was definitely the first course at the University to require that all student work be submitted via the web (http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/frec480/students99f.html); the initial motivation for this was simply the high cost of printing color hardcopy. Web design techniques are integrated into the curricula of both FREC 480 and FREC 682 (http://www.udel.edu/johnmack/mad_dog).

FREC 480 is taught twice a year, is a core requirement for natural resource management majors, and is taken by almost all wildlife conservation majors. GEOG 471/671 and FREC 682 are taught annually.

Curriculum design changes to be supported by this grant:

1. New course to train peer consultants

Although we are increasingly orienting our course assignments to student teams rather than individual students, we are both often overwhelmed with questions during supervised lab sessions, and our departmental graduate teaching assistants often don’t have the GIS background to help out. We are proposing to recruit junior and senior undergraduates as well as graduate students who have performed well in GIS courses to be peer consultants or "tutor/facilitators" for student project teams in our courses.

We will create and co-teach a one- or two-credit course, probably cross-listed as FREC/GEOG 667, to provide additional technical training for these peer consultants during the semester in which they assist with another GIS class. This course will primarily broaden student expertise in the GIS software used at the University. We will also cover basic UNIX and Windows system administration, including web server management. A 600-level number will allow interested graduate students to take the course for graduate credit.

Our peer consultants will also take a one-credit "Tutorial Methods of Instruction" class, either CHEM 467 (Hal White), BISC 422 (Deborah Allen), or equivalent.

Since GIS skills are not software-specific, we will continue to use different GIS software in each course. The technical training for peer consultants will introduce the user interfaces and summarize the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of these. We will experiment with cross-course assignments of peer consultants. For example, a peer consultant recruited from GEOG 471 and familiar with ArcINFO might be assigned to help a student team in FREC 480 that is using ArcView or IDRISI. The consultant’s most important function is to assist the team in formulating the problem into a logical sequence of generic analytic steps. Familiarity with the software-specific command sequences or menu choices is not so important.

We anticipate several benefits from a peer consultant program. First, the peer consultants will give us instructional support so that we can fully commit our GIS curricula to team learning. Second, the peer consultants will refine their own technical skills in our peer consultant training course, and reinforce these skills by teaching others. The extra technical training, the exposure to multiple GIS softwares, and the peer consulting experience will all enhance the value of their GIS skills in the job market. Third, we expect the peer consultant program will be a natural lead-in to undergraduate research opportunities, internships and/or Degree with Distinction programs in environment-related disciplines.

2. Redesign of existing courses

We will formally redesign the curricula of FREC 480, FREC 682 and GEOG 471/671 for team learning. While these courses are already strongly oriented to hands-on projects, most of these projects are designed for individual students rather than teams. We anticipate being able to address more complex problems in a team learning environment.

The transition to team learning should generate some synergies between teaching, research and public service. Both of us do GIS analyses for various local and state agencies, and we receive more agency request for student interns with GIS experience than we can satisfy. Once our courses are reoriented to team learning, we would encourage agencies to submit real-world problems as projects for our student teams.

We are committed to teaching these GIS courses at least annually; indeed, rising enrollments may necessitate some additional sections in the future. These courses are likely to be specified as core requirements for a proposed degree program in geographic information systems that is currently under discussion in the Geography department.

Evaluation:

We are particularly interested in assessing the effectiveness of cross-course versus same-course assignments of peer consultants. We hope to have at least one cross-course and one same-course assignment in each of our three classes, and will solicit student teams’ evaluations of peer consultants as part of the regular end-of-term course evaluation.

We will compare teams’ evaluations of peer consultants against consultants’ self-assessments of teaching effectiveness and their own learning experiences. An overall positive correlation between the team and self evaluations of peer consultants would support the hypothesis that team learning and peer consultant learning are synergistic. We can also compare the team assessments and self-assessments of cross-course versus same-course peer consultants.

A formal test of our proposed team learning approach versus our current approach would require parallel sections taught each way. We would rather commit to the team-learning approach entirely, and rely on less rigorous cross-year comparisons of student evaluations of our courses.

We would be happy to summarize our experiences and present our evaluation results at an ITUE session or elsewhere.

Budget:
 

Computer lab equipment upgrade to support FREC/GEOG 667	$9,500
Summer salary/fringe for grad assistant	$3,500
Travel (present at PBL conference)	$2,000
TOTAL	$15,000

Matching support:

DeLiberty, full-time faculty on 9-month appointment, will volunteer time for July and August, 2000
Mackenzie, full-time faculty on 11-month appointment, will match with July and August salary
Sun workstation to be dedicated as web-server for student projects
 

--John Mackenzie, Food & Resource Economics
--Tracy Deliberty, Geography