Transformations
by Mary Ann Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Geography, and Meg Stewart, Academic Computing Consultant for GIS, Vassar College
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Managing and Supporting GIS in Higher Educational Contexts, index of articles
Growth of GIS at Vassar College
Challenges and Advantages at a Small Liberal Arts College
The Importance of Institutional Support
GIS has emerged as a powerful technology for instruction, for research, and for building the stature of programs and schools that offer GIS courses (Openshaw 1991; Longley 2000; Sui and Morrill 2004) Consequently, it is useful to consider the conditions under which GIS instruction and research programs grow and spread on campuses. At a recent meeting of GIS-teaching faculty sponsored by NITLE participants discussed the fact that colleges often expect GIS instructors simultaneously to teach courses and labs, manage labs, and build user communities on campus. Discussions at this meeting indicated that these coincident goals are always stressful and are usually unrealistic. Faculty can rarely be effective in building, maintaining, and teaching a GIS program all on their own.
Colleges and programs with dedicated lab managers or other technical support—without teaching responsibilities but with some time for research or grant applications—keep their teaching faculty happier and build a better lab more efficiently. In this article we discuss how this support has helped build and maintain a GIS program at Vassar College, a small liberal arts college which had no GIS lab or instruction before 1994, but by 2005 had four labs equipped with ArcGIS, including one dedicated GIS lab and one small research lab. Although Vassar continues to see challenges in expanding GIS use, two key factors in our growth have been support in the central administration and the creation of a lab administrator dedicated to maintaining the GIS lab.
Vassar College, a selective school of 2,400 students, is unusual for a small liberal arts college in that students can major in Geography. Within the Geography program, part of the Geology and Geography department, we initiated GIS instruction in the mid-1990s when the technology became a major development of the discipline (Wilson 1996). However, GIS is an important technology for geologists, as well (Baker and Case 2000). Both geographers and geologists tend to view phenomena in a spatial context and must be able to share and nurture that ability with their students. Technology-based spatial analysis has become central to both disciplines. With the support of their geology colleagues, geographers at Vassar took the initiative in bringing a full-fledged GIS computing facility to campus.
GIS-based research and teaching have been ongoing at Vassar since 1994. Our first lab was cobbled together in a small lab space with mis-matched and awkwardly positioned computers and no system for projection. As a learning space, the room was awful. However, the GIS teaching and research we managed to conduct within this lab demonstrated the value of GIS in the curriculum. By 1998, with funding from central computing and the Dean of the Faculty, a new computer lab, dedicated to teaching with GIS, was created in a former map room in the Geology and Geography department, housed in the charming, 115-year-old Ely Hall. The first of its kind on campus, the 10-seat GIS lab originally had Macintosh computers on which we ran MapInfo GIS software. This lab, with its computers arranged around a central table and projection at one end, has been effective at facilitating discussions as well as lectures. We have also found it essential to network all of the computers (using Netopia’s Timbuktu software) so that any monitor can be projected on the screen. Thus students can share and discuss their work in labs and classes. Since 2000, we have migrated to personal computers running Windows OS, and we currently use ArcGIS software.
The success of the GIS Lab as an effective learning space helped us to raise the profile of GIS on campus, and geography faculty were invited to give several college-wide, GIS-related workshops. Moreover, the style of the space was copied in other high-end computing facilities (the Scientific Visualization Lab and the Media Cloisters) that have been created on campus, and the errors within the GIS lab have been corrected. For instance, they have avoided window glare, which has been a problem in the GIS lab because of the old arched windows; the new labs have better lighting; and in the Scientific Visualization lab the projection screen is behind the instructor, so that students’ attention is not divided between the two ends of the room. Having these other high-end facilities on campus has been important for us, since interest in our two semester-long GIS classes, Cartography: Making Maps with GIS and GIS: Spatial Analysis, has been so great that we now teach those courses in the 22-seat Scientific Visualization lab. However, as demand for that popular space grows, we are contemplating a major expansion of our current GIS lab.
As the overall awareness of and interest in spatial analysis and GIS grew at Vassar, we also created a “mobile GIS lab,” comprising 21 tablet PCs, also running ArcGIS software, and funded by an instructional technology grant from Hewlett-Packard. We take these tablet PCs to classrooms outside the department and on field trips. We also have two seats of ArcGIS software in the Media Cloisters, which is centrally located in the library, and in the summer of 2005 we built a new, three-seat faculty research lab dedicated to GIS and remote sensing research.
Initially, GIS classes were taught by visiting faculty or by faculty who used GIS in their research but were not GIS specialists. When the case was made for better GIS computing facilities, the department also recognized that the long-term solution for a better GIS program should be having a specialist on the faculty systematically to organize the curriculum. A temporary three-year visiting professor position opened in 1998 through the Dean’s office. By 2001, we sought a better long-term solution and hired a biogeographer, Mary Ann Cunningham, who teaches two semester-long GIS courses as well as other courses in which GIS is used extensively.
The department’s support for GIS helped us attract two tenure-track geologists who use GIS extensively in research, and who bring it into their classes as well. These geologists, Kirsten Menking and Brian McAdoo, routinely teach GIS labs and exercises for their courses. Other faculty members who are not specialists in the technology have also used GIS, or are beginning to use it, in research and teaching. These include geologists Jill Schneiderman and Jeff Walker and geographers Yu Zhou and Joe Nevins.
Originally, faculty maintained the software and hardware in the GIS lab, such as it was, with the aid of their spouses and children. Central computing lent very little support to the GIS program prior to 1998 when we expanded the lab. After much discussion, the administration eventually created a part-time computer lab administrator position, currently held by Meg Stewart. Stewart is responsible for maintaining the computers in the GIS lab and mobile lab, updating the software, communicating with software vendors, publicizing the GIS program, and helping with GIS software questions and problems that arise among faculty and students. Other contributions of the lab administrator have included help with grant writing and grant administration, collaboration on papers and books, and general GIS outreach to the wider college community.
In addition to professional staff, we typically have three student research assistants who staff the GIS lab in the evenings. They also help the faculty with research projects and assist the lab technician with routine maintenance of the GIS lab computers. These coveted positions, created when the lab was initiated, are usually filled by the top students from our GIS courses.
Support from the Dean’s office has been critical for our growth, as it is with any investment in infrastructure and technology. The Department of Geology and Geography has been effective at building and presenting arguments for new labs and software, but sympathetic administrators have agreed to fund new construction, to upgrade software and hardware, and to support a GIS lab administrator. The Department has relied on support from the office of the President, the Dean of the Faculty, the Vice President of Computing and Information Services, and the Office of Development. Almost every stage of the facilities expansion outlined above required support from the central administration.
This support has been earned, however, by the recognized importance of GIS in technological instruction on campus. Like many colleges and universities, Vassar tries to be at the forefront of technological instruction. Several key persons in the Dean of the Faculty’s office and in central computing were genuinely excited by the capacity of GIS and were enthusiastic for its application in other disciplines. Because GIS is a broadly applicable, visually effective, and exciting technology, investments by the Dean reap enthusiastic responses from alumnae/i, donors, and others. Thus GIS has been a tool that allows the Dean to help the Department while the Department helps the College.
In just over a decade, we have seen slow but steady growth in our GIS activities at Vassar. GIS course enrollment has doubled since 1998, from about 15 per year to over 30, the amount currently supportable by our teaching faculty and facilities. In the spring semester of 2005, we had oversubscription of our GIS: Spatial Analysis course, which precipitated our move to the 22-seat Scientific Visualization lab.
Equally important, the number of non-GIS classes that use GIS for projects or labs has grown steadily. At least 7 non-specialized courses, with over 140 students, used the GIS labs in 2005. This increase is a key part of expanding GIS access and use on campus (Chalmers 2002), and it greatly exceeds what we can accommodate in dedicated GIS and cartography classes. Most classes using GIS are still in Geology and Geography, but especially with the addition of the tablet PCs, we have been able to introduce GIS to classes in other disciplines, such as Urban Studies, Environmental Studies, and Biology. These projects have helped build support from faculty across campus, and that support has been essential for supporting our growth. Faculty members recognize the usefulness of GIS and send their students to take GIS and cartography classes. Larger enrollments build a bigger cohort of experienced students, help increase the level of knowledge and interest, and also raise visibility of GIS on campus. In addition, students are eager to take GIS because they appreciate its value as an employable skill (Brown 2004). We have received five grants for research, teaching, and professional development in GIS, all in the past five years. Three of these were from Vassar’s internal funding opportunities, which have supported us generously. We have also received two key GIS-based external grants, one from the Environmental Protection Agency and the other from Hewlett-Packard, which have helped us expand our program.
GIS at a liberal arts college differs in many ways from GIS programs at larger or more technically-oriented schools. Our students are bright, but all are not necessarily adept or experienced at technology (Padgett et al. 2000). Students at Vassar are encouraged to survey disciplines broadly, and few specialize in one field early enough to develop deep expertise. Thus we have few students who manage to take more than one GIS course and fewer still prepared to do truly professional quality work (Shepherd 1998). While many schools build their programs by contracting projects for external agencies, we have not yet found this option realistic. In addition, students’ schedules are tight, as they are at most schools, so that they can rarely afford the time for additional independent work beyond lab assignments, though many agree that independent work is the most effective way to build extensive software skills.
Departments in liberal arts colleges are usually small, so getting a critical mass of faculty involved in one area of inquiry or one method of inquiry, such as GIS, is challenging. Many faculty appreciate the value of the technology, but few outside of our regular users are able to use GIS extensively. Primary obstacles are probably the time commitment required to learn and retain the software (Baker and Case 2000) or apprehension about the software (Casey 2004). Because we have no graduate program, we cannot rely on graduate students to carry out research, build a user community, or help non-specialist faculty branch into new technology.
At a liberal arts college, financial resources can also, at times, be more flexible than at large institutions. Major universities have more funds, but competition among departments is keen. Even at a well-endowed college like Vassar, availability of funding ebbs and flows, but we have lately been able to accomplish things we think are important. Also, expectations of productivity may be more relaxed here than at larger institutions—allowing a few years of ramp-up time to produce increased numbers of majors and publications. Because we are small, administrators and professors know each other, and there is a certain amount of friendly sympathy. Also because we are small, members of the college readily understand that we must pull together, rather than squabble over resources, to maintain the college’s profile (Gupta 2001).
As at many small colleges, our dedicated GIS teaching staff consists of one faculty member with the expertise in GIS and the long-range vision needed for future success of our program. Though additional faculty in Geology and Geography use GIS in their teaching and research, it is not under their purview to build a college-wide GIS program. Moreover, soliciting a wide range of support and generating campus-wide awareness and interest requires the attention of more than a single GIS instructor.
Among the many factors contributing to growing GIS at Vassar, technical support - provided by a sympathetic administration - has been the key to Vassar’s success. Most of our GIS program’s growth, in terms of classes and students, lab space, and funding, occurred after the creation of the lab administrator position. Vassar has recognized that teaching and lab management are both time-consuming and important jobs. When both are done by teaching faculty, neither is likely to be done very well. At Vassar, the GIS lab manager has been principally responsible not just for maintaining software, but also for lobbying for upgrades and for expanded lab licenses, communicating with other labs on campus, and communicating with the central computing office about hardware and software issues, maintenance, and management, including media for printing, projectors, security, servers, and wiring (Padgett et al. 2000). In addition to these lab maintenance tasks, our lab administrator initiates grant applications and participates in publishing.
By taking on these responsibilities, the lab manager helps maintain the sanity and happiness of the teaching faculty—including those who use GIS but are not GIS specialists. Any college hoping to retain GIS teaching faculty, to see them engage students in GIS-based research, or to give them tenure, must recognize that administrative support is essential for these academic goals (Bolger and Sprow 2002).
Colleges and universities interested in GIS instruction and research, then, need to allocate sufficient resources, especially staff time, to make their programs work (Gupta 2001). We feel Vassar’s administration has recognized these issues in its effort to support technology instruction. A good teaching lab and software are important, but the availability of a lab administrator with GIS experience, with time to maintain relationships and projects on campus as well as equipment, has been key to our growth and to our well-being as a department. With these elements in place, GIS teaching faculty can afford the time to support students and maintain GIS-based research that can engage students further.
The authors wish to express gratitude to Frances D. Fergusson, Norman Fainstein, Diane Balestri, Yu Zhou, Ronald Sharp, Bret Ingerman, and James Olson for their past, present, and future support of our GIS program.
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