The Needs for Microtraining, Learning objects and Open Educational Resources in GIS

With today’s rapid changes in socio-economy and technology, knowledge and learning are critical issues for private and civil service organizations. The needs for competence development range from short informal courses (without ECTS credits) to formal courses at university level (with ECTS credits). This article describes objectives and results of a Leonardo project, eGIS+ that developed and implemented course modules with a variety of complexity and duration in order to satisfy complex patterns of needs for competence development and training.
The main objectives of the project eGIS+ (2007 – 2009) (Leonardo da Vinci, LdV pilot project, under the Lifelong Learning Program, LLP, “Transfer of Innovation”, ToI), was to establish co-operation between European Universities and GIS user organisations and to develop modularised courses intended for Internet based learning. Another objective was to establish communication links within the partnership in the project and to disseminate and share “best practises” in different educational situations and for different target groups. The ideas were to spread the knowledge and understanding of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to a broad range of people in society, targeting groups such as teachers and pupils in primary and secondary schools (K-12), students and researchers within higher education, employees in private- and civil service organisations and public in general. eGIS+ is based on results, experiences and further developments, from a previous Leonardo project E-GIS (2002 – 2006).
As the target groups are highly diverse, content, software, media presentations etc. was adapted to cultural and language differences within the partnership. All educational materials are available at www.e‐gis.org, free of charge as open resources.
The aims within the project was to create awareness of GIS and cover GIS competence needs at a variety of levels in Europe through course modules that ties up with each other from very short informal modules with open content up to high level Master GIS programs.