 Hi, I'm Don Keele. I'm your instructor for Geography 497C, which is called GIS for Transportation, Principles, Data, and Applications. I wanted to put together a little PowerPoint with some narration and video here so that I can give you more of an idea of my background educationally, my work in the last 30 years in the field, and also cover a little bit about what the course will be about. So I'll be discussing some of the particular aspects that we'll be getting into in the course, but then to wind up, I'd like to finish by giving my expectations of what you'll be able to take away from the course, interactions with other students, the information that you'll get from the online aspects of things, and just in general, some expectations. So stick with me for the next few slides, and I'll lead you through that information. So to sum up, what I'd really like you to get out of this course is, number one, a good amount of interaction and learning from others. This can be very meaningful. There will be a lot of your fellow students in this course that have much background in GIS for transportation. Some of you may not have that much background, but in addition to what you'll learn from the online material and hopefully from me, you'll be able to get further good practices, information, advice, background on GIS-T from some of your co-students. So I'd like you to interact as much as possible through discussion forums, being able to post comments, questions, responses, many different kinds of ways that we can interact together, and please do so as much as possible. You'll get the most out of the course if you're able to do that, get further background in more of an informal way rather than just the online course materials. I think you'll find it will be the highlight of the course. You'll also get a good foundation in GIS-T principles. I mentioned a few things already. We'll be looking at linear referencing systems. We'll be looking at data management systems, standards and metadata, how the different components of GIS specifically related to transportation work, things like linear overlay. There are certain aspects of GIS for transportation that really aren't found in other areas of GIS. So you'll be getting a good background in that for the first several lessons before we get further into the course and talk about applications and other aspects. You will get a good appreciation for the importance and the proper use of data. I just mentioned standards and metadata are important in GIS no matter what the application area, and that certainly holds for the transportation aspect of GIS. So we will cover some material in those areas, and I hope you will be able to get a good appreciation of data and how it's used. You'll, in the second part of the course, get quite a good exposure to real-world applications for GIS-T in many different areas of application. All the different modes, highways, rail, bus, transit, air transportation, we'll cover all of those in some detail. You'll also have a group activity where you'll have a chance as a group and as a team to look at real-world applications and talk to the people who designed them, maintain them, the sponsors of those particular projects, and I think that will be a really useful thing for you to get some exposure to. I also want to emphasize that there will be quite a bit of writing required for the course and evaluation of applications and other types of information where you'll be doing a lot of thinking and assimilating and distilling information that you read about and using your writing skills to communicate not only to me for getting a grade, but also to other students. It's important to have good writing skills in this field. It's not just a technical field, and if you do end up working in GIS for transportation or you're in that field already, you'll soon or already know the importance of having good writing skills. So there will be quite a bit of emphasis on that in this course. Finally, we'll have a little bit of hands-on experience that you'll get exposed to. This is definitely not a programming course. It's not an application development course. There may be some room for accommodating some of those possibilities on an individual basis, which you can talk to me about if you do have interest in that. But primarily, you'll get some hands-on experience, but your learning will be more through evaluation and viewing and looking at real-world applications rather than spending a lot of time doing programming-type work. And finally, I hope you have some fun. We should have a real interesting mix of people in the course. I'd like this to be an enjoyable experience as much as possible. I certainly hope you learn a lot, but I think we can have some fun along the way and hopefully I'll make the course go very well and you'll look back and hope and see that you had a worthwhile time in being able to not only learn but enjoy what you were learning at the same time. So I wish you good luck as the course begins here. Please feel free to contact me through the appropriate channels. I'll be very glad to have as much interaction as possible with this course. And I wish you good luck as we go forward. Thanks for watching this.