Courses Taken
Over the past few years, I have taken several professional development courses to address specific issues with my teaching. Some of these include:
- Confronting Unconscious Bias on Campus and in the Classroom (Mar. 2019)
- The UnMarking Studio: Balancing Student Needs with Faculty Realities (Feb. 2019)
- Capturing your Story: Designing Teaching Portfolios to Express your Professional Narrative (Aug. 2018)
- Recognition of Achievements in Teaching and Learning Program: Awareness Session (Aug. 2018)
- Course Portfolios: What are They, and Why Make One? (Aug. 2018)
- Orientation to Scholarship, Research and Creative Activity at VIU (Aug. 2017)
New Methods of Instruction and Assessment
Innovations to Facilitate Online Teaching
Geog 525, Global Positioning Systems and Survey Analysis is only offered online and is one course that demanded some innovative technical solutions when I developed it. The two main issues were:
- Teaching people about Global Navigation Satellite Systems when equipment was difficult to access; and
- How to have one assignment for everybody in class when people live in vastly different environments all over Canada and in other countries.
I considered a number of different options, such as buying a full class set of GPS receivers and signing them out to students for the duration of the course, buying a limited number of professional-grade receivers and signing them out to students for a limited time, and asking students to buy a particular model of GPS receiver in lieu of a textbook. Ultimately, we decided upon the last option, having students purchase a Garmin recreational receiver for use in a number of assignments. This mitigated some potential problems with exporting and then re-importing electronic equipment when students lived abroad. Students were permitted to make use of their own recreational receivers, with the proviso that it had the same capabilities as the one that we recommended, and the student was responsible for learning any differences in the operating procedures.
One of the assignments that students completed with their receiver was to record a half-day “tour” of their town as a track log. The students took a picture at each waypoint, and then converted the track to a KML file, loaded it into Google Earth, attached and aligned the photos at the waypoints, and then exported the completed assignment as a KML file. For those students who were willing, we made the completed virtual tour available to all their classmates. This was a wildly popular assignment that brought the students together, even if they were thousands of kilometres apart. We had virtual tours of Dubai, Inuvik, NWT, a snowmobile tour in Northern BC, and virtual tours of ski hills in various parts of the world. The main concern with this assignment as student safety, and we very clearly advised students to take no risks. Fortunately, these were mature students and we never had any issues.
Having students buy their own receiver worked very well, but still left students without experience with a professional-grade receiver. We solved this problem by recording a Trimble SSF (Standard Storage Format) file for a GPS data collection mission using our Trimble receiver. A RINEX (Receiver Independent Exchange Format) file for differential correction was downloaded from a nearby SOPAC (Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center) station for the time in question, and then students were asked to make a differential correction to the file that they were supplied with using the data from SOPAC.
For another assignment, we found software that was able to replay an NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) file. Students could then connect this “signal” with the laptop version of ArcPad that ran on one of our servers. Students could then log into the server by remote desktop to complete the assignment. Combining this with a mission planning exercise resulted in an assignment that worked well and didn’t require students to come to Nanaimo to complete their assignment.
Making Technical Material Interesting
Request for Proposal (RFP) Lab
In face-to-face classes I have taught on project management, instead of having hours of paper exercises about requests for proposal (RFPs), bids, contracts, and project management, I have students go through a 2 full-day exercise in which they respond to a proposal on the first day and then execute the project the second.
This exercise is a little stressful for some students, but it really does show how and why project management skills are important. It’s common for students who have little experience preparing and submitting bids to prepare bids that are astronomically expensive. Despite receiving guidelines on what sort of wages makes sense it provides an interesting example when the high bid price is over ten times the lowest. Other ways that their inexperience shows is through a lack of testing of the procedures. This emphasises how a smoothly running project occurs by design, not by accident.
On the first day, students must digest the RFP document, participate in a question and answer session held by the client, and produce a bid response document giving the amount that they are bidding and the method that they intend to use. Students have time to practice risk-reduction by testing techniques on sample data to try to ensure that the project will proceed.
At the beginning of the second class, the bid prices are revealed to the students, together with the number of technical points scored. This is used to pick whose “companies” move forward. The “bosses” are then asked to form their teams, instruct them on the methods that will be used, and execute the project.
At the end of the second day, students need to submit the deliverable to the client (the instructor), calculate the amount of “profit” or “loss” for the contract, and submit invoices to the client. The assignment is mainly graded on the quality of the work delivered, but there is a one-mark bonus assigned if students are able to show a profit.
After the assignment is over, I review the prices and profit/loss statements, then have a general discussion about what they learned during the exercise. For most students, this is the first time that they have worked in this sort of environment, but because my classes are frequently heterogeneous, some students may already have experience bidding on contracts. In this case, their experience helps educate the entire class during the wrap-up discussion.
Coal Seam Lab
In my spatial analysis class, we discuss spatial models. In one of the later labs, we discuss the interpolation technique known as Kriging. This technique was developed by a South African mining engineer (D.G. Krige) to help predict where ore bodies can be found underground. This is a fairly difficult topic, so to make it more interesting, we use a real-world example. Nanaimo was founded as a coal mining city, and although mining ended decades ago, there are still extensive beds of coal in the area. Because of the complex geology of the area, with extensive folding, faults, and past glaciation, the coal seams come to the surface in many places.
A digital elevation model (green/orange) is displayed on top of predicted coal seam elevations (grey) to visualise where coal seams can be found on the Earth’s surface
Students are provided with well log information that shows the depth of the coal seams below the surface. They must use this data to determine the absolute height of coal seams, and then use Kriging to model the coal seams. The resulting models are intersected with a Digital Elevation Model of the Nanaimo area, and the intersections (i.e. the coal seams) are converted to linear features. These are visually compared with some known coal seam locations to help validate the models.
We load the modelled coal seams into GPS receivers, and teams of students drive around for part of an afternoon and make an attempt to find the seams. The coal seams are quite obvious, since the dark black soil contrasts strongly with the regular brown colour of the soils in the area. Kriging has a large number of options, and not all of these are appropriate, and students are also known to make mistakes from time to time. As a result, only about half of the teams actually do find coal, but this reinforces the value of model design and validation.
Small sample of coal returned by student.
While it is a lot of fun when students do find a coal seam roughly where their model predicts it to be, this is also a potentially dangerous assignment. To reduce the risks, students are required to work in teams of three. One student drives, another navigates, and the third is a spotter. Every team is required to have a cell phone and numbers are exchanged to ensure that there is two-way communication in case of emergency. Students are instructed to obey all private property signs and to not trespass on people’s properties, even if signs are not posted. Fortunately, there is a large amount of publicly accessible land in the region, otherwise this assignment would not work.
Accelerating Marking to Improve Instructor Responsiveness
Computer-Aided Marking
One of the innovations that I have tried in recent years is to shift some of the marking burden to our course management system (CMS), which is currently Brightspace (Desire2Learn). Since all ADGISA classes, both face-to-face and online make use of Brightspace, such changes are available for all classes.
The idea behind this is to reduce marking times, so that more of the instructor’s effort can be put into improving the course and making sure that it runs well. Because many of the answers for GIS labs are numerical, Brightspace can be set up to accept numerical answers and automatically grade them. If the answer given is within a defined threshold of the correct number, it is judged to be correct. This allows for some minor variations in method, which is common in GIS analysis. This method has been shown to work in Moodle and Blackboard as well.
Not all questions can be treated this way. Short answer and essay type questions need to be read and graded by a human being. These can be answered in a CMS as well, so that the student does not need to switch between tools for answering questions. Even questions that require maps to be produced can be answered in this manner by using screen shots and pasting them into the CMS.
For all questions, feedback can be automatically provided to the student, once the questions have been marked, so as long as the student’s answer is not too off the wall, then the correct answer, some comments on the correct answer, and several likely incorrect answers can be specified as well as what went wrong (“If your answer was 12.3 ha, then this happened and you can correct it by…”). Such a system is not perfect, and all answers need to be reviewed by the instructor. However, over the course of several course deliveries, it does significantly reduce the amount of effort involved, and increases response times, which is always popular with the students. I have found that assignments can be marked in less than half the time once the system is up and working.
Group Evaluation
One of my biggest challenges has been to mark cartographic assignments rapidly and effectively. There are three issues involved in addition to the differing ability and levels of training in incoming students. The first is simply that providing a proper critique of a student map is time consuming. There are many things to consider, such as map elements, balance, colour, symbols, and the amount of white space, and sometimes these interact to create difficult design problems. The second is that for some students, written suggestions are not effective, so the suggestions for improvements to their map go unheeded, and the same mistakes are repeated from assignment to assignment. The third is that many students have little to aspire to — although professionally designed printed maps are everywhere, new cartographers often fail to realise how closely they can match these designs with relatively little effort using GIS.
I have found that I can reduce the amount of marking by focusing on one particular component of map design for each assignment. To supplement this, I can help those students who are struggling by choosing one of the best maps submitted for the previous assignment (but not necessarily the best), requesting permission to show it to the class, anonymizing it, and then having a class discussion about the best and worst features of the maps. This helps to show those students who are struggling what is possible, allows me to address why things are done the way that they are, and even helps the student whose map is shown by having more people looking at it, so that few issues are missed.
Some Healthy Competition
Steve Platt was the first winner of the Carto Cup in 2006.
At Vancouver Island University, GIS courses are offered with the Geography and Forestry Departments, as well as in the Advanced Diploma in GIS Applications (ADGISA) and Master of GIS Applications (MGISA) programs. In 2006, I founded the Carto Cup, a competition that runs in the Spring semester. Students are asked to create a map on any subject using any media. The best submission is chosen by a panel of three judges chosen from the various programs. Winning students receive a prize, but the main benefit is having bragging rights and a distinctive entry on their résumé.
Future Goals
As I continue to develop my teaching skills and style, I have identified a number of goals that I wish to pursue over the next few years:
- Although most students are satisfied with the quality of evaluation that they receive, I spend too much time marking assignments. To improve my performance, I intend to work on ensuring that lab assignments provide more guidance and that questions are more carefully worded to avoid possible misunderstandings. On the marking side, I want to organise my prepared responses better and use automated marking when possible and appropriate. I have set a personal standard to return all assignments within 3 working days of submission.
- I need to refine my teaching of cartographic design. It is a challenge to keep artistically-inclined students interested while giving other students a framework that they can apply to create attractive and functional maps. I find that for many students, even one assignment without a mapping component leads to the next map slipping in quality. One way to simplify the instruction is to pick a reasonably good map from the latest assignment submitted, request permission and anonymize it, then present it to the class for gentle evaluation.
- I will continue to find new, fun, and relevant ways to introduce topics to students. Some approaches are to tie an assignment to topical subject, involve local information and field visits, that repeat a project that a GIS professional has been asked to solve, and which integrates multiple aspects of their learning (e.g. GPS and modelling of the local area).
- I plan to create at least one lesson to teach troubleshooting strategies. Being able to troubleshoot problems and figure out a solution is something that should be second nature for students, but for too many of them, they’ve grown up with intuitive, nearly bug-proof software, and find it difficult to move forward when something unexpected happens.
- I will augment my use of local examples with course material that focuses on issues faced by indigenous people and minorities. Some examples might be siting assisted living projects within walking distance of shopping, recreational, and social service facilities.