USING CONCEPT MAPPING TO DESIGN REUSABLE LEARNING OBJECTS

FOR E-EDUCATION IN CARTOGRAPHY AND GIS

David DiBiase

The Pennsylvania State University Penn State University has offered an instructor-led online Certificate Program in GIS since 1999. An expanded online curriculum leading to a Master of GIS degree was launched in 2004. The first course in both programs is an orientation to geospatial data. Included among nine weekly lessons is one that introduces such fundamental cartographic concepts as map scale, coordinate system, datum, and map projection. Feedback from hundreds of students suggests that this has been the course�s least successful lesson in terms of learning effectiveness and student satisfaction. With support from a Digital Libraries in the Classroom project funded jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee, I used concept mapping to plan the revision of this problematic lesson within a reusable learning object framework. Keywords: e-education, elearning, online learning, learning objects, concept map, GIS education, cartographic education

E-EDUCATION IN CARTOGRAPHY AND GIS e-Education relies upon information technologies�especially the Internet�to mediate the interactions among students, instructors, and instructional content that foster learning. It enables learners and instructors to study at times and places most convenient to them. Such convenience is a necessity, not a luxury, for adult professionals whose commitments to family, career, and community prevent them from participating in traditional on-campus educational offerings. In the U.S., as in Europe and for a rapidly increasing portion of the world�s population, e-education is no longer a novelty. A 2004 survey of 1,100 U.S. colleges and universities revealed that 1.9 million students were enrolled in asynchronous online courses (defined as those in which at least 80 percent of content is delivered online) in the Fall of 2003. Responding institutions expected such enrollments to increase by over 24 percent in 2004; over 50 percent of institutions consider online education to be critical to their long-term strategies (Allen and Seaman 2004). e-Education in cartography and GIS is also becoming commonplace. Specialized distance education in geographic information systems has been available since 1990 (originally as correspondence courses, later via the World Wide Web) from institutions associated with the UNIGIS International consortium (www.unigis.org). Since 1997 more than 230,000 individuals from 189 countries have at least previewed one of the low-cost, non-instructor-led, online training modules offered by ESRI through its Virtual Campus (Johnson and Boyd 2005). A survey conducted in 2002 on behalf of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) identified 27 higher education institutions that offered asynchronous online courses in geographic information systems and science; fourteen more were considering future course development (Wright and DiBiase 2005). Since 2001, an Institute for Advanced Education in Geospatial Sciences at the University of Mississippi (http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/) has used funds provided by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to commission development of up to 50 non-instructor-led online courses that the Institute hopes to license to other institutions. By 2005, at least ten higher education institutions worldwide offered complete online graduate degree programs in geographic information systems and science, including City University London, Curtin University of Technology, Leeds University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Northwest Missouri State University, the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Denver, the University of London, and the University of Salzburg. Not every e-education program is successful, and not every successful program is mentioned here. Although the long-term impact of e-education in GIS and cartography is uncertain, there is no doubt that it has extended educational opportunities to many individuals for whom face-to-face options are unavailable.

The World Campus Certificate Program in GIS After a year and a half of planning and course development, the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) began offering an online Certificate Program in GIS through the University�s virtual �World Campus� in January, 1999. Two goals guided program design: helping adult professionals to become more knowledgeable and skillful GIS users, and generating a new source of discretionary revenue for the Department (DiBiase 2000). The program originally consisted of a year-long sequence of four non-credit, instructor-led courses, each ten weeks in length. (The original course sequence appears in Table 1.) Each course required 8-12 hours of weekly student activity on average. Although they were expected to complete weekly assignments, students were never expected to log into the course at any particular time or place. Students completed assignments using educational licenses of desktop GIS software (originally Intergraph�s GeoMedia, later ESRI�s ArcView). Students showcased their achievements in personal e-portfolios. Penn State instructors directed discussions and read and responded to student questions daily. All course content delivery and communications were mediated through a Web-based course management system (originally WebCT, later ANGEL). The sequence, objectives, and content of the courses were completely redesigned for the target clientele. From January 1999 through December 2004, 519 distant students earned Penn State�s Certificate of Achievement in GIS, and the program emerged as the Department�s primary source of discretionary income. The program earned ESRI�s Special Achievement in GIS Award in 2004 for innovation in GIS education.

Required courses

GEOG 5121: The Nature of Geographic Information (8 Continuing Education Units)

GEOG 5222: Elements of GIS Part I (10 CEUs)

GEOG 5223: Elements of GIS Part II (10 CEUs)

Elective courses (at least one required)

GEOG 5224E: GIS in Practice: Environmental Applications (10 CEUs)

GEOG 5224P: GIS Programming and Customization (10 CEUs)

GEOG 5224S: GIS Seminar in Geospatial System Design (10 CEUs)

Table 1: List of courses comprising the non-credit Penn State Certificate Program in GIS, 1999-2004

The Master of GIS degree and Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program in GIS In 2004 Penn State�s Graduate School and Board of Trustees approved the Department of Geography�s proposal to create a new professional degree: the Master of Geographic Information Systems (MGIS) (DiBiase 2004a). Beyond the original goal of producing knowledgeable and skillful users, the MGIS program seeks to help students become leaders in their organizations and in the profession. At the same time, the former non-credit Certificate Program was approved as a for-credit offering for postbaccalaureate students (those who already possess bachelors degrees). Both offerings were approved for delivery through the World Campus. The format and delivery of the courses is identical to the former non-credit certificate. An expanded curriculum was designed in consultation with an advisory board composed of industry leaders and scholars from four different academic programs and research centers (Table 2). Students accepted to the MGIS program complete individual study projects supervised by academic advisors that culminate in public presentations at professional conferences with advisors in attendance. Less that one year after the new programs were approved, the number of distant students pursuing the MGIS degree (35) and the Postbaccalaureate Certificate of Achievement (approximately 200) now exceeds slightly the combined number of undergraduate (approximately 160) and graduate students (60) who seek the Department of Geography�s resident degrees (BS, MS, and PhD).

Required courses

Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program

(11 credits total)

Master of GIS Degree Program (35 credits total)

GEOG 482: The Nature of Geographic Information (2 credits)

GEOG 483: Problem-Solving with GIS (3 credits)

GEOG 484: GIS Database Development (3 credits)

GEOG 583: Geospatial System Analysis and Design (3 credits)

GEOG 584: Geospatial Technology Project Management (3 credits)

GEOG 586: Geographical Information Analysis (3 credits)

GEOG 596: Individual Studies (6-9 credits)

Elective courses (at least 3 credits for Certificate, 12 credits for MGIS)

GEOG 485: GIS Programming and Customization (3 credits)

GEOG 486: Cartography and Visualization (3 credits)

GEOG 487: Environmental Applications of GIS (3 credits)

GEOG 488: Geospatial Data Acquisition and Integration (3 credits)

GEOG 489: GIS Application Development (3 credits)

GEOG 495C Internship Supervision and Mentoring (3 credits)

GEOG 497k: GIS for Analysis of Health (3 credits � offered by Southampton University)

GEOG 597: Special Topics (seminars) (3 credits)

Table 2: List of courses comprising the Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program in GIS and the Master of GIS degree program, 2005.

Additional offerings planned for future development.

Feedback from students in an introductory online course in cartography and GIS The course I developed and have taught since 1999, Geography 482 (formerly 5121): The Nature of Geographic Information, is an orientation to the fundamental properties of geographic data, and to the practice of online learning. The course spans the wide range of technologies, professions, and institutions involved in producing geospatial data, including land surveying, the Global Positioning System, aerial photography and photogrammetry, social surveys such as those conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, satellite remote sensing, cartography, and geographic information systems. In addition to demonstrating their basic fluency with relevant terms and concepts, students (most of whom continue their studies toward the MGIS degree and/or the Certificate of Achievement) learn to create and maintain Web-based e-portfolios in which they publish project assignments for review by instructors, fellow students, and others. In 2004, course enrollment averaged 51 students per quarterly offering. In addition to several other assessment activities I conduct surveys of student satisfaction at the conclusion of every course offering. Penn State instructors are expected to use a standardized instrument called the �Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness� (SRTE) to solicit student ratings. The SRTE consists of four or more seven-step Likert scales

by which students are asked to rate the quality and effectiveness of courses and the instructors. Elsewhere (DiBiase 2004b, 2005) I have analyzed student satisfaction data in relation to faculty workload over three study periods: July 1999 through June 2000, July through December 2001, and July through December 2002. Overall, students expressed considerable satisfaction: median ratings on all criteria during all three study periods were only one step below the highest possible rating. The SRTEs also include two open-ended questions that invite students� comments: �What aspect of the course did you like best?� (hereafter referred to as �likes�) and �What aspect of the course needs the most improvement?� (�dislikes�). I analyzed 55 �likes� and 36 �dislikes� from 50 unique respondents during the 1999-2000 study period (response rate 70 percent), and 71 �likes� and 51 �dislikes� from 55 unique respondents during the 2001 study period (56 percent response rate). Among other findings was a disproportionate number of critical comments about one of the nine course lessons, namely Lesson 2: Scales and Projections. Among the eighteen lesson-related �dislikes� submitted by students in the 1999-2000 cohort, nearly half (eight comments) felt that the treatment of map projections and coordinate systems was inadequate (DiBiase 2005). Together with the many questions related to this topic that I routine address in online discussions, this feedback convinced me of the need to thoroughly revise Lesson 2 at the earliest opportunity.

DIALOGPLUS project The opportunity presented itself in 2003 in the form of a research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Joint Information Systems Committee as part of their joint Digital Libraries in the Classroom programme and facilitated by an international alliance called the Worldwide Universities Network. The project, called Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to the Teaching and Learning of Geography (DIALOG), combines the efforts of geographers, education specialists and computer scientists at Penn State, Leeds, UC Santa Barbara, and Southampton (PLUS) who proposed to develop and share a collection of reusable digital learning �nuggets� through the Alexandria Digital Library (www.dialogplus.org). Although nothing came of the digital library component, the project was successful in developing a number of innovative educational resources, as well as a collaborative methodology for designing digital learning objects. The project has also proved successful in fostering a novel cooperative agreement by which partner institutions are beginning to share online courses and students.

REUSABLE LEARNING OBJECTS The DIALOGPLUS project provided support to re-conceive and recreate my problematic lesson as a set of formal digital reusable learning objects that could be deployed within Penn State�s ANGEL course management system and within comparable systems at partner institutions. The DIALOGPLUS project team soon discovered, however, that because we lacked a shared conception of what a learning object should be, the objects we were creating were not easily shared. Despite the efforts of standards organizations like the Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) project, the concept of a �learning object� remains ambiguous. It was to avoid the intellectual baggage associated with the term, in fact, that the DIALOGPLUS project team purposely substituted the idiosyncratic jargon �learning nugget� in its successful proposal. The closest thing to a prevailing definition appears to be Wiley�s (2002, p. 6): �any digital resource that can be reused to support learning.� To make sense of this very broad definition, Wiley offers a taxonomy of reusable learning object types, from �fundamental� objects (a single JPEG image file, for instance) to �generative-instructional� objects, which include �logic and structure for combining [lower level] learning objects � and evaluating student interactions with those combinations� (Wiley 2002, p. 19). Such high-level learning objects, Wiley argues, should be more widely and effectively reusable than lower-level objects. After considerable discussion and experiment, many participants in the DIALOGPLUS project came to accept Wiley�s argument, and to adopt the model illustrated in Figure 1. The DIALOGPLUS learning object conception includes three elements: A learning activity (e.g., guided exploration of a Web site or other widely-accessible resource, using a Web-based or desktop software application, a paper-and-pencil exercise downloaded as a PDF file, etc.), supporting material (e.g., text and graphics and/or digital video) needed to situate the activity within a knowledge domain and a set of educational objectives, and some form of self-assessment (e.g., an automated quiz that provides immediate feedback) by which students can gauge the extent to which they have achieved the objectives.

Figure 1: Elements of reusable learning objects as adopted by the DIALOGPLUS project and implemented in the revision of the Geography 482 lesson.

As Wiley (2002, p. 9) points out, �the most difficult problem facing the designers of learning objects is that of �granularity.� How big should a learning object be?� We turned to concept mapping to help parse lessons (whose granularity is determined by the amount of time a student can be expected to devote to his or her studies in a given week) into learning objects (whose granularity should reflect the discreteness of particular concepts).

CONCEPT MAPPING TO DESIGN RESUABLE LEARNING OBJECTS Concept maps employ nodes (representing conceptual elements), connecting lines (representing relations between elements), connecting words (which categorize relations), and patterns (as in multidimensional scaling) to depict the content and structure of a subject area. Novak (1990) points out that concept maps can be used in four ways: (a) as a learning strategy, (b) as an instructional strategy, (c) as a strategy for curriculum planning, and (d) as a means of assessing students� understanding of science concepts. Using concept maps as a means to design learning objects is a variant of (c). Figure 2 below is the final version (after several revisions) of the concept map that represents topics included in Lesson 2 of Geography 482. Figure 3 shows the same concept map, but superimposed with the boundaries of seven learning objects: map scale, geographic coordinate system, datums, coordinate transformations (including plane coordinate transformations, datum transformations, and map projections), the UTM coordinate system, the State Plane Coordinates system, and map projections. One advantage of using concept maps to define lesson content is that concept maps seem to foster collaboration better than text outlines. The concept map I developed for my troublesome Lesson 2 (shown in Figure 2 below) elicited several discussions with colleagues that advanced my understanding of the subject as well as their appreciation of my own efforts and insights.

Figure 2: Concept map depicting elements of Geography 482 Lesson 2, including scale, coordinate systems, datums, and transformations (including coordinate transformations, datum transformations, and map projections)

Figure 3: Concept map depicting elements of Geography 482 Lesson 2 overlaid with the color-coded boundaries of seven reusable learning objects. Learning objects are meant to be re-combinable as well as reusable. This implies that the linear sequence of topics embodied in the typical course outline must be broken down, and that overlaps between related topics must be

identified and built into freestanding objects. The spatialized format of the concept map helps in both ways�linear sequencing is absent and overlaps between topics are revealed. Notice the close correspondence between the objects Map Projections, UTM Coordinate System, and State Plane Coordinate System, which follows from the fact that the two coordinate systems share a similar basis in conformal map projections.

EXAMPLE LEARNING OBJECT Figures 4, 5, and 6 are excerpts from one of the seven learning objects produced from the concept map and learning object design layout shown in Figure 3. Figure 4 is a learning activity in which students manipulate a Flash application to demonstrate their ability to locate positions specified with randomly generated pairs of geographic coordinates. Figure 5 is a portion of the supporting material that specifies learning objectives for the activity and situates it within the context of geospatial measurement scales. Figure 6 shows part of an automated quiz that enables students to self-assess the extent to which they have fulfilled the educational objective of the object.

Figure 4: Learning activity element of a reusable learning object on the geographic coordinate system. One of seven learning objects that make up the revised Lesson 2 of Geography 482: The Nature of Geographic Information.

Figure 5: Supporting material element of a reusable learning object on the geographic coordinate system. One of seven learning objects that make up the revised Lesson 2 of Geography 482: The Nature of Geographic Information.

Figure 6: Self assessment element of a reusable learning object on the geographic coordinate system. One of seven learning objects that make up the revised Lesson 2 of Geography 482: The Nature of Geographic Information.

CONCLUSION This paper describes a methodical approach to the design of course materials for an orientation course in geospatial data and e-education. Concept mapping is used to portray the content of each weekly lesson in a way that overcomes the linear sequencing of typical course outlines while revealing explicitly the connections and overlaps among related concept elements. The concept map is then parsed into learning objects by drawing boundaries around the (often overlapping) elements of discrete concepts. What the approach lacks in efficiency it seems to make up in rigor, potential for collaboration and peer review, and as a basis for a truly interoperable specification for learning objects for GIS and cartography education. The impact of the approach on student learning and satisfaction is currently being studied and will be reported at the 2005 ICA conference.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The National Science Foundation provided support for the research and development reported here. Thanks to Stephen Weaver for assistance in developing Flash applications to support learning activities in Geography 482,Lesson 2.

BIOGRAPHY David DiBiase directs the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute within Penn State�s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Institute personnel collaborate with faculty members in the College�s five academic departments and three other institutes to design, develop and deliver on-line courses and programs serving adult professionals across the country and around the world. As a faculty member in Penn State�s Department of Geography, David manages its online Master of GIS degree program. His recent research includes empirical studies of faculty workload and student satisfaction in e-education as well as higher education strategy and policy. David has earned awards for educational innovation from Penn State and the Association of American Geographers. He was lead author of the GIS Certification Institute�s educational achievement criteria and is coordinator of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science�s Model Curricula project.

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