Esri Virtual Campus and Pennsylvania State University have teamed up to create a new option for online GIS learners. Penn State Edition courses are designed to meet the needs of students who like the flexibility of self-paced online learning but who also want the support of an instructor.

David DiBiase, director of the Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach, home of Penn State's online World Campus Certificate Program in Geographic Information Systems, proposed instructor-assisted courses as a way to combine the best features of the Virtual Campus and the World Campus.

"Virtual Campus courses are attractive because they are more concise, more affordable, and more accessible than most of the courses that colleges and universities offer," says DiBiase, author of the Virtual Campus course Understanding Geographic Data. "The thing students like best about Penn State's online courses is that instructors are there to help. By adding instructor assistance to Virtual Campus courses, we hope to provide educational opportunities that have the same advantages as standard Virtual Campus courses but are more challenging and more rewarding."

Penn State Edition courses incorporate a developmental approach to instruction, in which students are expected to demonstrate increasing competence as the course progresses. Like other Virtual Campus courses, Penn State Edition courses include concepts and hands-on exercises that give students opportunities to solve problems using Esri software. Unique to Penn State Edition courses is a threaded discussion environment. The primary medium for student-instructor communication is a course bulletin board on which students can post messages to their instructor and read messages posted by the instructor and other students. Instructors visit the course bulletin board every Business day and, in most cases, respond to student questions within 24 hours or less. Penn State Edition courses involve 24 to 48 hours of student activity (four to eight hours per learning module) and approximately one to two hours of student-instructor communication.

Also unique to Penn State Edition courses are projects at the end of each course module. Outlining a specific goal along with general procedural guidelines, each project requires students to independently apply the skills they have learned throughout a course module to solve a problem using Esri software-a format that effectively models the type of assignment a GIS professional might encounter in the real world. Upon completion of a project, students submit to their instructor a screen capture that illustrates their finished project and a written description of how they solved the problem. In addition to earning a certificate of completion from Penn State and Esri for successfully completing all six module exams, students who successfully complete all course projects earn four Continuing Education Units from Penn State.

The Penn State Edition of Learning ArcGIS 8, Part I is an adaptation of an existing Virtual Campus course, while Cartographic Design is a new course authored by Penn State Associate Professor of Geography Cynthia Brewer.

Learn more about these Penn State Edition courses.