Making GIS Click: Lessons from a Stanford Classroom

Diana Moanga, PhD, remembers being the student opening a geographic information system (GIS) application for the first time and feeling overwhelmed. The long ribbon of tools, panes filled with properties, layers stacked on top of one another, and instructions to add data, run a tool, export a layout. There were directions to do something with geodatabases, rasters, and shapefiles—words she had never heard before.

It wasn’t until she started using GIS in her own research that it clicked. The data and the results were tied to something real, something tangible. There were reasons to take the steps needed to get the insights she required. There was context.

Now a lecturer in the Earth Systems Program at Stanford University, Moanga has built a series of GIS courses that make the technology make sense, more quickly for her students. The goal isn’t just knowing which buttons to click but understanding what those clicks can reveal.

Her approach has earned recognition across Stanford, including the Doerr School of Sustainability’s 2025 Excellence in Teaching Award.

Moanga’s approach to teaching GIS is shaped by how she learned it. She was an undergraduate studying marine science when a required course in marine spatial planning introduced her to the technology. Tasked with mapping sea turtle data off the coast of Florida or exploring the different forest stands in Tongass National Forest in Alaska, she could do the assignments but found it difficult to connect the work to her studies or understand what the work was building toward.

That changed when she began using GIS while working on coastal resilience in Florida. She was able to connect the tools to real places and questions. “I was fascinated by all the things that you could do with GIS—mapping marine environments, tracking species migration, analyzing land cover,” she said.

As a teaching assistant, she encountered students experiencing GIS for the first time much like she had, not grasping what the steps were leading to. “You really learn a topic when you have to teach it to others,” she said.

At Stanford, her classes draw students from business, public health, engineering, and the humanities all working toward the same goal—figuring out how to apply spatial thinking in their own fields. She has her students start with a question. It could be, what’s the best running route on campus? Where do environmental risks overlap? How accessible are local parks? The goal is a real one. Students aren’t just completing steps. They’re working toward an answer. Each concept, term, and tool is introduced in that context.

“The concepts become easier to retain because students understand the purpose of the workflow,” Moanga said.
 

Moanga teaches a sequence of courses designed to move students from foundational skills to independent analysis.

• Fundamentals of Geographic Information Science: Students begin working in ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online while learning core GIS concepts.
• Advanced Concepts in GIS: The focus shifts to more complex workflows, cartographic design, spatial analysis, and final projects that can support community partners.

Together, the emphasis shifts from learning tools to making thoughtful, defensible choices about data, analysis, and communication.

In each class, in-person lab work is critical. She designs her labs with two questions in mind: What will students care about? And what do they need to learn?

“I get a lot of joy from building a lab from scratch,” she said. “Coming up with the question—when you can do anything anywhere in the world, what would you do? What area would you map, and what story would you choose to tell?”

That creative starting point is paired with identifying tools and workflows that can be applied broadly, so students can learn one approach and reuse it across different problems. The topics vary, but each lab assignment is tied to a specific set of skills—working with land cover data, creating 3D visualizations, or developing site suitability analyses.

Each step of the lab assignment explains not just how a tool works, but why it is being used and what it contributes to the larger question. Students are not simply completing a workflow. They are learning how to approach a problem and make sense of the results.

That structure carries into more advanced workflows, including the development of composite indices that integrate variables measured at different scales and enable comparison of spatial patterns across a region. Moanga shows how the same approach can be applied to different situations—showing where coastal hazards converge, where renewable energy development may be most suitable, or how conditions change over time, for example. The workflow stays relevant, even as the problem changes.

Perhaps paradoxically, Moanga has designed her courses around using ArcGIS Pro, Esri’s more technical desktop GIS that students are likely to encounter in internships and early careers. “ArcGIS Pro can feel overwhelming at first, but that’s where the value is,” she said. “It gives students access to the level of analysis and workflows they’ll actually need outside the classroom, so they’re not just learning a tool—they’re learning how to answer real questions.” She uses the labs to give students time to work through ArcGIS Pro’s complexity in a structured and engaging way.
 

As the course moves forward, their confidence grows. By the third lab, students are working through multistep analyses tied to real places. In later labs, they begin combining datasets and comparing patterns across them. By the midterm, they can develop complex visualizations and design creative workflows.

For their final, students identify questions they care about and determine how to approach those questions and apply the methods that best support their analysis. They then turn their attention to how that work is communicated—through map design, cartographic choices, creative layouts, presentations, interactive dashboards, or a digital story with ArcGIS StoryMaps that captures audience attention. Examples have included mapping ecological sensitivity along popular hiking trails in the Norway’s  Lofoten Islands, exploring iNaturalist as a potential metric for insect abundance, shifting tornado hotspots, and analyzing access to recycling facilities in Montana. 

“One of the strengths of this coursework is that students feel they can apply what they learn to make an impact,” Moanga said.

Moanga builds the courses with evolving input from her teaching assistants, asking what students are responding to, what they’re struggling with, and what they’re interested in learning.
 

One such assistant, Ruby Gates, had similarly struggled with applying GIS to the problems she wanted to explore, using tools she knew were the industry standard—until she sought out Moanga as a mentor during her senior year. She later returned for her master’s program as a teaching assistant for Moanga’s introductory and advanced GIS courses.

In the early weeks of the class, students follow the labs closely and ask for help when they need it. By mid-quarter, they begin working more directly with TAs and with each other—comparing approaches, troubleshooting together, and testing different ways to complete a task. By the final weeks, they start bringing their own ideas into the work. Gates recognized the value in that progression because she experienced it herself.

“I think that’s when it started clicking for me,” she said. “I saw how much broader GIS could be, because I wasn’t limited to my own scope anymore.”

The structure of the course allows students to stay with a problem longer, refining their analysis, asking new questions, and pushing their work beyond what’s required. Students aren’t locked into a single outcome and can shape their work to reflect what they’ve learned. For Gates, now pursuing a master’s in civil and environmental engineering while she is a TA for Moanga, that’s where the learning lands. GIS stops being something you complete for a class and becomes something you use to think through a problem.
 

For Moanga, the goal isn’t for students to complete a course. It’s for them to carry the work forward. That shows up in how projects are structured. Students are encouraged to refine their labs and final projects into pieces they can keep—work that can be extended into research, included in portfolios, or developed beyond the course itself.

In the Advanced GIS course, that often connects directly to applied applications. As part of Stanford’s Cardinal Courses program, students can partner with local organizations through the Haas Center for Public Service, applying GIS to projects with community impact. For one project, a student built an interactive application using ArcGIS Experience Builder to combine ecosystem data, climate action plans, and a “resilience gap” analysis into a single interface that lets users explore how environmental risks and planning decisions vary across California counties. It’s the kind of project that extends beyond the classroom—but it starts with the same foundation students build in the labs.

“A lot of students take this class at a pivotal moment in their career,” Moanga said. “They start thinking, ‘I want to pursue this further. I want to look at jobs that involve GIS and spatial analysis.’”

That’s why she continues to refine her courses—updating labs, incorporating new tools, and leaving room for students to explore what matters to them. Her goal remains simple. “I want students to enjoy GIS,” she said. “I want them to see how much they can do with it.”