 Well, good morning or good afternoon, evening, not sure where you might be viewing from. But welcome to this session called Geo for All, Blending OER, Open Data and Open Software in GIS Education. My name is David Abernathy and I am a Professor of Global Studies and Geographic Information Systems at Warren Wilson College, which is a small liberal arts school just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And today I just wanted to talk a bit about my experience, an ongoing experience in transitioning an introduction, introductory GIS course from what I would consider predominantly closed course to one that's increasingly becoming open. And I'll talk about steps I've taken along the way and next steps as we look towards continuing becoming more open in the future. So I'm going to frame this in just two main bullet points here. First of all, talk a bit about why did we transition from proprietary software to almost exclusively open source software in our GIS courses at Warren Wilson College. This is our first step really in moving from closed to open. And then second, how can we then in turn, leverage some additional layers of openness, open educational resources, open data and open pedagogy to further the educational mission of both our institution, as well as the goals of the Geo for All initiative. And so first, talking a bit about why transition to open source software when we already had access to, to very popular software system for geographic information systems, why transition, and I came up with this catchy acronym to encapsulate why we did that. And this was also the sound that our IT department made when when I asked to, if we could set up a full Linux lab, totally open source from top to bottom and they, they let out a bit of a squeal, they said we're a small department. We're trying to keep all of our labs sort of on the same system. And so, ultimately we decided, okay we'll run open source software but we'll run it on the Windows operating system that was being incorporated in several labs on campus. In addition to that these ease I think talk a bit about the reasons why we felt like we wanted to make this transition. The first of first of those is expense this is probably the low hanging fruit these days in higher education when institutions are looking to save money. I was asking them that I wanted to switch to open source could we do that. And when I said, well it's going to cost a lot less than what we're paying now they said sure go for it. And so what we were doing at the time this has changed over time at institutions and it's different at larger institutions than our small college like mine, but what we were paying for at the time was just for enough computers to fill our entire lab, a single space. We also paying for an additional software extension called spatial analysts that allows students and researchers to do land use analysis and some things that the folks really wanted to be doing in our classes. So we had to do that, and we were paying on top of that maintenance fee. Just to kind of maintain the software upgrades. So again, not maybe a prohibitive expense but enough of an expense that when when told that we could remove that expense from the budget, folks were happy. And so, now we have a lab that's running entirely on free software. And I point to Richard Stallman here to remind us that that free is not just the price. Right, it's a sense of liberty and so we'll come back to that point. But in addition to the expense, I think this liberty that it gives you is something we should consider as well. I also think that transitioning to open source sort of fit the ethos of my particular college, at least, and maybe others. We're like I said a small college in the mountains, we tend to have we have a work program or one of eight work colleges in the country so all students work. In addition to going to school. And we have a, as we can see here we have a blacksmith shop. We have a fine arts, excuse me, fiber arts crew. We have a working garden, working forest, working farm. So our students are used to making. They have that maker mentality I like to say, and I think open source software is not that different. Our students like peeking under the hood. They like this idea of something built by community, rather than by corporation. And so I feel like open source software really fit alongside the mission of my institution. The key related to that is as education. There are a lot of folks who have have talked about in here I come back to Richard Stallman about the sort of social implications of using open source software. And here another another quote by Stallman talks about, we should use, we should consider open software the same way we do conservation and voting and the sort of citizens social mission. We've had some research in the past, or this particular editorial, for example, in nature, that if you, you know if you believe in the scientific method if you believe in looking at how people came to their results not just the role results they achieved, then you need to look under the hood, and arguably proprietary software kind of creates a black box and you can't fully see how experiments were conducted but if you use open software, you can see exactly what was done. And I think sort of the impetus for me, starting to make the transition was, thanks to a lot of hard work being done at the OS geo foundation, their geo for all initiative in particular, really pushing in education, the teaching of geographic information systems with open source tools. And that really got me to think about making this transition and I thought I'm going to, I'm going to go for it here. And also ease of use. Some of you have likely used open source software if you go back a couple of decades it was a little more difficult to use. It was harder to get up and running. And so the free was often countered by, well, yeah, it was free in cost, but it's eating up all of my time that has a cost to increasingly that's not been the case. Now this is a bit of a dated screenshot that the software we use has matured past this. At a particular point in time, you can see this sort of image on the right raster analysis using actually not QGIS which is the software I'm using here, but software called grass and as we began to see these incorporated together, I could, I could access tools from other software programs, all within this one interface. And that to me was from a teaching perspective and an introductory class. That was a game changer, I could do sophisticated and robust analyses, but not have to teach for different software programs. So it became increasingly easy for everyone to use. Another e here and is expanding beyond classroom walls and this is one that actually had more of an impact than I anticipated. And that before we had to have the software on desktop computers in a single lab, we were not allowed to hand out discs and say hey love this on your laptop or hey let's put let's put a couple computers in the library and let's run it over there couldn't do that. But with open source software of course you can you can have as many copies running as you'd like. And so suddenly we were able to release GIS from the lab environment into the full college environment. We had students in classrooms, working on GIS we had students in the library. I had a student catch me in the cafeteria with a map on his screen that that he was working on and had questions and I thought this is great. And it's also great because students can work at 2am in their dorm rooms which is when they seem to prefer to do their homework. And so it really expanded our abilities to to use the software as we saw fit. Another is extensibility and thing I like about the tools that we tend to use in our classes is that you can always find an add on, or if you have the skills you can build an add on you don't have to rely on the software that comes out of the box. Right. And so, if you look at qgs for example there are things called plugins, but you can go download. If there's something that you're really trying to do and you can't find a way to do it using the core software. There might be a tool out there that allows you to do it. Or again, if you have the skill set you can even make your own. We also use the R statistical programming language, and in our, there are packages, kind of the same general idea that you can grab a package download it for your specific task. I tried to fit the packages that start with the prefix geo on the screen and I couldn't do it right there's there's these aren't all maybe geographic in nature. But there are many, many packages in for the R statistical programming language that allow you to do sophisticated GIS as well. So you can find the packages that meet your needs. And then I guess and all the final e and maybe the most important important one would be employment, right that we can find ways to give students skills, meaningful skills for meaningful careers. And some folks were saying well that's why you should teach the proprietary software because that's probably what these people are going to encounter in the working world. And my counter to that was to say, as long as we teach the fundamental concepts and vocabulary, I think students can move from one platform to another that's my goals to not training to be platform specific, but to have the ability to move across multiple platforms. And one of our students went to work for the city of Asheville. And one of the, the folks there Scott Barnwell told me that we actually seek out people who have open source experience because we found that they tend to be more nimble. They're almost like GIS ninjas, they would say because they can kind of figure out how to solve problems, not worry about which buttons to push in the in the software. And so while we transition to open source and that's been over probably 1012 years ago that we did that. And so I found that students really seem to enjoy it, I felt like the learning objectives were not diminished. If anything, I felt like we maybe enhanced student learning by transitioning to open source. So let me thinking, you know how else can we sort of move down this road of open, because I started feeling a little guilty or hypocritical, because here I was espousing the benefits of open source software, and then turning around and asking students to buy an open source textbook. And if you, this was something that I'm sure many people at this conference if not everyone knows is that textbook expense is not an insignificant issue. And the price of textbooks has not abated, and it has become really an equity issue for many students, the cost of textbooks alone can be detrimental to student learning. And so the price I was looking at the different books I tried over the course of several years, and students told me, Well, first of all, it's expensive, but some people this was this was there where just was a student valuation this is this to hand hold the it's it's kind of like a recipe book it tells me what the point and what to click, but it doesn't teach me to doesn't ask me to think, right. And so that obviously is not ideal. So I then shifted change books to one that didn't talk about software at all really just talked about sort of the underlying science of geographic information science, and then the students bought and said well wait a minute this is almost two theoretical. I like to have some kind of hands on coverage in this this book, I'm not getting what I need still. So I couldn't find a book that met that sort of bridge that gap. Not really for me, not to mention that that software changes tools change, and therefore the book model is a little too slow to keep up with the software and the tools that are that are being updated and created each year. And also, again, a single book sometimes covered certain things I wanted to teach really well. Sometimes it covered things in a manner I thought was a little too difficult, perhaps, or maybe it didn't even touch on a topic that I found for my classes was was super important. So, all of these reasons I felt like okay, I have to look beyond the textbook is not not working several students just told me outright I'm not buying it. I'll photocopy my friends book or something to that effect so problematic to say the least. And so that's when I turned to looking at open educational resources. Again, the folks in this conference know these definitions all too well I suspect, but to me it's really sort of extending that philosophy of open source and applying it to open, open educational resources so the text the tutorials the any materials that we wanted to use to learn. I began turning to open educational resources. And about that same time, I started to see that initiative appear at multiple places in higher at one of which was NC live library consortium. They had an open education project, and they actually enticed faculty to make a switch to an open education more resource in a course and they gave you some guidance on how to go about that. And so that's when I learned about the mini repositories out there. I won't list them here but they're one example would be an open textbook library here. And this is actually a text I decided to to use essentials of geographic information systems. If you can see the very great print down there you might notice that the publication date was 2011. But I actually found like this book will not be out of date because it's not talking about specific software it is talking about geographic information science, the core concepts core vocabulary. And I thought that it did a really good job of doing that. And because it's open. It's free and open source basically, I can use this text. I don't have to assign all of it. I don't have to feel guilty because students spend a lot of money on it I can pick and choose which chapters I like, and I can bring in other supplemental material to cover the things that I do well here, and also some software specific tutorials and tools. So by moving into this open educational resource I think it really opened up our access to all kinds of teaching and learning materials that otherwise we would not have been able to use. And then thirdly, after sort of switching the software switching the textbook, I began looking at open data and again open data. As I'm sure you know, data that can be freely used shared and built on by anyone, and again adopting the principles of open source software. And so what that meant for me is that I was able to turn to tutorials or data sets that for free on the internet that I could then incorporate into class and that was important because some people I think are afraid of not having a textbook that has a shiny wrapped up DVD full of what I could go. And people told me like you're going to have trouble you have to clean the data you're going to have issues out there, all of which I think are good learning points of a course, but there's so many data sets out there that are free and open that I didn't feel the need to make my students buy an overly priced DVD full of packaged tutorial data. And a decade ago, we started to see this movement really take off in my community in Asheville. The city got behind open data actually sponsored an open data day, and it's in sponsored a civic day of hacking. And so we saw this push to sort of take what had previously been either buried in PDFs or CDs into an open data portal online that we could, could then use the city of Asheville created an open data portal cities across the country. We're doing this Asheville certainly was not the first, but it's effective that you can go into the site and easily access multiple data layers of all kinds for the city. At the state level, we saw the consolidation of many, many organizations and many, many compartmentalized GIS, GIS operations into NC one map, where I can get anything from parcel data. I can get aerial imagery, all sorts of data increasingly available through this site. And at the national level of course there's data.gov. So, so again, we're accessing more data than we could ever need on these different portals and students really seem to like poking around and seeing what they can find to incorporate into their projects. The OSG, of course, coming back to the OSG foundation provides a lot of resources, tutorials, video guides, things to help students and and teachers for that matter, learn about the possibilities of open source software. In the final step and this is one that is certainly not complete by any stretch of the imagination but where I'm trying to go with it is to move towards something called open pedagogy. And open pedagogy, I think means maybe different things to different people but to me it's essentially trying to move away from the educational model that says okay we're going to put information into your head and you're going to spit it back out on a test I'll grade it and we're done. Right, so it's really a move away from what has been dubbed sort of the disposable assignment and move towards something that actually has real value and has value beyond just the professor teaching the class. And so, and thirdly sort of focusing less on the letter grade and more on true knowledge creation and helping the students learn the skills, the concepts, the theories, the ideas and then be able to apply them to their own problems that they run across. So again this is early days for me but what I'm what I've done to try to move down this path is one I have, I've added a assignment for students that's essentially build a tutorial for the, for the students who come after you. Students in my spring semester of GIS were asked to pick something that we've already had already done in class, and write up a four page tutorial to address. I gave them specifics about be sure to share the vocabulary, walk through with screenshots, tell us what's the goal of using this particular set of tools, and what kind of results might you expect. Students got into this because they knew, oh wow, I'm actually creating something that will be used by other people next semester is not being thrown away. I also had students very early on in the course, write a short paper on what I call sort of a critical GIS assignment. So they were to go out and look for examples of GIS being used in the world for either good or or maybe in a way that needed specifically examined. So looking at things like gerrymandering or redlining or different ways in which spatial data and software could be used to again restrict social justice or perhaps more hopefully promote social justice so thinking again about not just the technology that we're learning in class, but how these technologies have an impact on the world around them. We're having students as much as I can possibly do take on projects that are for not just me, but for an outside, quote unquote client right and that might be their work crew. We've had students map storm drains or lighting fixtures for campus crews. We've had students do mapping projects for outside non governmental organizations, but importantly, there is a set of eyeballs out there that are not my own. I find students that there is a real world value to what they're doing. And I guess to wrap up I would say that in terms of sort of takeaways and next steps for us. I felt I feel excited that we've kind of, I feel like critical mass around open source software at least we have people in conservation biology ecology GIS statistics courses all using the our statistical programming language. I feel like we've had this sort of beyond just GIS a move institutionally towards open source. And we have been able to springboard from that and create a new minor in data science and just got approved. A new major in data science and so we're really trying to ramp up our focus here on data science spatial data science, but focus almost exclusively on open source and open educational resources. And this switch has helped lead into some student success, whether it be graduate school, or whether it be career wise, we've had students trained on open source using open educational resources, going into things like an applied math master's program, or working for a data science startup or geospatial analytics PhD program, or working for cities and their GIS department. I feel like again it's it's maybe still anecdotal at this point because we're still sort of evolving but I feel like we've been able to have some success by moving this way. And I'll just quickly share to wrap to wrap up. NASA has a program called NASA develop and it's basically a 10 week internship program. And it's, it's, it's therefore students at the undergraduate level graduate level I think maybe even occasionally high school, but they get to work with a senior climate scientist on a real project for a real client, and they have a real deliverable. And so two of our students went to work on this particular one which is to develop a snow melt monitoring tool using satellite data in Alaska. And our students found this to be an amazing experience. Again, they got to work with a senior climate scientists they knew they had it deliverable out there was not a disposable assignment. And they were able to do not only survive this 10 week experience but thrive one of our students became the team leader, and they learned, they turned back on their sort of open source experiences as sort of contributing to their ability to tackle this sort of very large scale project. And so I again it's early days for us, I would say, but in my experience transitioning to open source, open educational resources, and open data, and eventually open pedagogy have made us all better teachers and learners. So thank you so much. I'll stop there. And have a great rest of your conference.