I have significant experience with course development, both domestic and international, face-to-face and online. Some of this course development has required travel abroad to connect with foreign partners.
Domestic Course Development
I developed Geog 466, Geog 501, Geog 521, Geog 525, and Plan 603 in their entirety, and developed significant numbers of lectures, lab assignments, exams and other materials for other courses on a strategic/as-needed basis.
Domestic Course Revision
I have updated materials for many sessional courses. Depending on the course and the regular instructor, I may work at simplifying lab assignments, clarifying instructions, or revising lab assignments. Revisions such as these are forwarded to the regular instructor to incorporate into the regular course materials.
In 2019, I asked two ADGISA students to prepare localised and updated course data sets as part of their practicum project. This resulted in an archive of data that can be used over the next few years to refresh the curriculum for a number of courses. I began this with three lab assignments for Geog 521 in Fall 2019, with replacement of data for ski hills, cougar (puma, mountain lion) habitat and pipeline routing assignments. The data sets that were created were designed to be a “plug and play” replacement for the previous data sets, as much as possible.
There are a number of reasons why we wish to substitute domestic data for imported examples:
- Local examples typically use the metric system, so that X, Y, and Z units are in meters. This gives students experience with dealing with conversion of areal units (m2 to ha), calculation of slopes.
- Map projections are chosen to give students experience with common Canadian map projections and projected coordinate systems that they are likely to use on a daily basis once they graduate.
- Using local examples allows for the introduction of topical examples, such as the construction of the controversial Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) project that is going through the courts at the moment. This helps to make the course more interesting and shows students how their work can make a difference. The original assignment used data from Oregon and the revised assignment uses the TMX data from British Columbia.
It should be noted that the intention is to have an appropriate mix of domestic and international examples in the program. There need to be sufficient domestic examples for students to learn local formats and conventions, but also enough international examples so that the students don’t suffer from tunnel vision. In some cases (e.g. network analysis using the Interstate Freeway system around San Diego), there are few equivalent data sets for Canada. To date, I have incorporated international examples from Lithuania, Ukraine, and the United States.
International Course Development
For international development work, I developed a majority of three courses (Lectures, PowerPoint slides, and Lab Assignments) for the Government of Lithuania (2007-2008) and one course for the Government of Ukraine (2013-14). However, I did not teach the courses, since I am far from fluent in Lithuanian or Ukrainian.
Multilingual Course Development
The Lithuanian language is fairly unique, and lacks many of the nuances of English. This forced some pedagogical changes when we received feedback from the translator that all four possible answers in a multiple choice quiz had exactly the same answers when translated from English to Lithuanian!
Moving from producing materials for Lithuanian delivery to Ukrainian delivery was an interesting challenge. Whereas our Lithuanian counterparts had very strong English skills and were able to use the English-language version of ArcGIS our Ukrainian partners were less fluent.
The Ukrainian language presented us with a different alphabet, which added some additional complexities. Although ArcGIS is not available in Ukrainian, it is available in Russian, which is similar to Ukrainian. In some places, such as in lists of values, English entries remained in the Russian interface, creating a multilingual obstacle course.
A portion of SDI-01 prior to delivery to the translators. Notice the mix of Ukrainian (data), Russian (ArcGIS interface) and English (ArcGIS lists) in the image (click to zoom).
In addition to the Russian language interface, preparing the lecture and lab materials presented their own challenges. We began by preparing a custom dictionary of GIS terms that we sent to our translators. This (and the liberal use of Google Translate) allowed us to understand the Ukrainian data, translate English data into Ukrainian and, in one case, to synthesise an artificial list of Ukrainian names to make a dataset seem more realistic. Because our translators weren’t able to create new screen shots, every graphic that was produced had to be letter-perfect in Ukrainian.
At the end, all of this hard work resulted in the first GIS textbook available in the Ukrainian language, with me as lead author.
Textbook developed for Ukrainian GIS education curriculum
Training the Trainers
During the kick-off meetings for the Ukraine Project, we had the instructors come to Nanaimo for orientation meetings and some advanced GIS training. These activities were fun and helped everybody to get to know each other before the teaching component of the project began in Ukraine. Since Ukraine is interested in developing a domestic wine industry, I adopted this as a theme for the spatial analysis component of the training.
Ukrainian GIS Instructors during training in Canada, 2014.
Working with a local winery in Duncan, BC, we were able to collect data, perform slope and aspect analysis, solar radiation analysis, and examine the soils of the property. As part of this, the students toured the winery, and were rewarded with a wine tasting. The owner of the winery received some international exposure and finished maps of his property in return for his hospitality and time.
Map of diurnal heating and nocturnal cold air flows at Blue Grouse Winery.