scholarly journals Open educational resources for cartography: the Thematic Mapping Tutor

Author(s):  
Barend Köbben

At the ITC faculty of the University of Twente, we have been teaching cartography for more then 60 years. Throughout this period, the technology of mapping has undergone spectacular changes and nowadays most students do not draw their maps any more, but use software instead. However, for maps to be effective in communication, their design still has to follow the same rules as before. Ideally, one wants to teach these design rules independently from the tools, such that the students understand how a good map works, not just which buttons to click to create it. For this purpose, we created the Thematic Mapping Tutor. It is an open, web-based system that provides a structured way of constructing thematic maps out of selected data. The system uses the input of the student to construct a map in the Vega-Lite grammar, which is transformed to web-graphics. In this paper we describe the educational philosophy behind the system, as well as technical details about its functionality. We report on first tests, and reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls of the system.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend Köbben

At the ITC faculty of the University of Twente, we have been teaching cartography for more then 60 years. Throughout this period, the technology of mapping has undergone spectacular changes and nowadays most students do not draw their maps any more, but use software instead. However, for maps to be effective in communication, their design still has to follow the same rules as before. Ideally, one wants to teach these design rules independently from the tools, such that the students understand how a good map works, not just which buttons to click to create it. For this purpose, we created the Thematic Mapping Tutor. It is an open, web-based system that provides a structured way of constructing thematic maps out of selected data. The system uses the input of the student to construct a map in the Vega-Lite grammar, which is transformed to web-graphics. In this paper we describe the educational philosophy behind the system, as well as technical details about its functionality. We report on first tests, and reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls of the system.


Author(s):  
Tel Amiel

<p>Remix is touted as one of the most important practices within the field of open educational resources (OER). But remixing is still not mainstream practice in education and the barriers and limitations to remix are not well known. In this article we discuss the design and development of a print and web-based booklet created to introduce the topic of OER to schoolteachers. The guide, the first of its kind available in Portuguese, was created through the remix and translation of existing resources available in English. Choosing design-as-remix raised a series of concerns related to licensing, attribution, context, and technical standards. In this article we review the concerns related to culture and inequity within the OER movement, followed by the design choices and procedures, and finally the implications of these issues for the open educational resources movement.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 325 ◽  
pp. 479-490
Author(s):  
Roza Dumbraveanu

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are facing a number of problems during the last decades: the need to update the curricula to make it compatible with the similar ones from other national and European universities; demand to update the content and the pedagogical approach due to knowledge, technological and research development. Open Educational Resources (OER) might be a sound strategy for institutions to meet these challenges. At the same time OER are themselves one of the challenges that the teachers are faced with. OER could be implemented in courses in different ways, depending on the types of OER and the educational philosophy adopted by the teachers. The paper describes some challenges for implementing Open Educational Resources by teachers in Higher Education in Moldova: the level of awareness on availability and usage of OER; fair use matters; quality assurance of resources; pedagogical approaches for implementing OER into teaching and learning. The paper also grasps the issues of the digital divide that emerge when investigating these challenges. The judgment is based on the literature analysis and on the author’s teaching experience within courses for initial and continuous professional teachers’ training.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quazi K. Hassan ◽  
Khan R. Rahaman ◽  
Kazi Z. Sumon ◽  
Ashraf Dewan

Open educational resources (OER) have become increasingly popular in recent times. Here, the aim was to synthesise the lessons learned through the development of OER materials for a university-level course called “environmental modelling”. Consequently, the topics of discussion included: (i) how to choose an appropriate creative commons license; (ii) ways of incorporating materials from other sources, such as publicly available sources, other open access materials, and an author’s own published materials if not published under a creative commons license; (iii) the impact of the developed OER in the field of environmental modelling; and (iv) the challenges in developing OER material. Upon developing the materials, we observed the following: (i) students enrolled in the course did not purchase textbooks; (ii) our OER materials ranked as one of the most accessed (i.e., number 7) materials according to the usage data that summed the number of file downloads and item views from PRISM (i.e., the hosting platform maintained by the University of Calgary); (iii) the students learned relatively better as per the data acquired by the University of Calgary’s universal student ratings of instruction (USRI) instrument; and (iv) other universities expressed interest in adopting the materials.


Author(s):  
Sabina Asensio-Cuesta ◽  
Adrián Bresó ◽  
Carlos Saez ◽  
Juan García-Gómez

Depression is associated with absenteeism and presentism, problems in workplace relationships and loss of productivity and quality. The present work describes the validation of a web-based system for the assessment of depression in the university work context. The basis of the system is the Spanish version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II). A total of 185 participants completed the BDI-II web-based assessment, including 88 males and 97 females, 70 faculty members and 115 staff members. A high level of internal consistency reliability was confirmed. Based on the results of our web-based BDI-II, no significant differences were found in depression severity between gender, age or workers’ groups. The main depression risk factors reported were: “Changes in sleep”, “Loss of energy”, “Tiredness or fatigue” and “Loss of interest”. However significant differences were found by gender in “Changes in appetite”, “Difficulty of concentration” and “Loss of interest in sex”; males expressed less loss of interest in sex than females with a statistically significant difference. Our results indicate that the data collected is coherent with previous BDI-II studies. We conclude that the web-based system based on the BDI-II is psychometrically robust and can be used to assess depression in the university working community.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1801-1817
Author(s):  
Gastan Gaoudio Thomas ◽  
Elmor Wagiu

Introduction: Graduate is one of the important support in the development of a university. Graduate have a role to assist universities in developing the university into the community through collaboration in academic terms. Since the establishment of the Adventist University of Indonesia (UNAI) to date has resulted in 12 608 qualified graduates, but the problems that exist today data on students graduated from UNAI difficult to find because UNAI not have a special service for containing information about the data the continuation of a career each of graduate that will be created as the relationships that can support the advancement of the quality of the Graduate at Adventist University of Indonesia. Methods: With the difficulty of knowing the whereabouts of graduate, an graduate tracer study system was created using Web-based GPS that aims to make it easier for universities to find out the alumni position and is expected to be able to overcome the problems above. The graduate tracer study system was designed using a website-based system. .The system of Graduate tracer study was designed using a web-based system. The system is easy to use by any user because it is built using the waterfall method as a method of system development, laravel framework for building websites and using the Global Positioning System (GPS) locator that serves Graduate. Results: The end result of this research is to facilitate UNAI system to track and determine the position of the Graduate as well as get information takes on new Graduate pass or long pass which spread to various area Discussion: It is expected that the future can be developed to add features that are useful scholarship to help students who are still studying, and add graphs about graduate information in getting a job.


Author(s):  
Maysaa Abd Ulkareem Naser ◽  
Sajad Mohammed Hasen

A graduation project is a form or work that the study authority requests from the student to measure what he made during the study. Designed an expert system for students’ graduation projects at the University of Basrah for students who are obligated to submit a project that qualifies them to graduate from the university. The system works according to a set of requirements, the most important is first: The student's possession of a high rate that qualifies him for the project. Second: he must possess half of the skills required for the project provided that it includes at least one programming language example (c ++, java, PHP, c #, etc ...). The system has many features that help the Supervisors and Students Committee to manage students' projects efficiently. System is built as a web-based system, with access limited only to the university's local network.


Author(s):  
Josephine Dunbar Davis ◽  
Samuel Bradley Cartwright

Prominent in the public debate on college affordability is the rising cost of textbooks. Owing to limited finances or mounting college debt, many students fail to purchase required course textbooks. Among the perils students without textbooks face are delayed course enrollment, high failure or dropout rates, and extended time to graduation. At Fort Valley State University, an Historically Black University within the University System of Georgia, the mathematics faculty first observed increasing numbers of college algebra students without textbooks, then, similarly, with upper division students. As a cost-savings measure, the faculty redesigned eight courses using open educational resources (OER). This chapter highlights the four-year results of faculty and students' OER course experiences. OER students have better grades, lower failure rates, and better attendance records than those using traditional textbooks. The attitude of OER students towards mathematics also improved. A total cost savings of $197,780 was realized with an average, per student savings of $198.


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