The rumors in the geo-bloggosphere gone crazy last weeks as ESRI announced an own-hosted MOOC (Massive Open Online Course):
They already featured this one here at PennState University hosted at Coursera as they provided access to their ArcGIS Online plattform for all participants. Now it seems like they would like to take things seriously.
- @david_gadsden (Esri Nonprofit Program coordinator, Technical Advisor@Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
- @pjdohertygis (Disaster Response Program Technical Lead at Esri)
- @kennethfield (Senior Cartographic Product Engineer at Esri)
Those three guys will be guest lecturers at the MOOC. Furthermore you should check out the linkedin group for the MOOC as it seems like you’ll get more information about the MOOC there.
Unfortunately there is still no content table available. But be sure that this MOOC will not be one of the basic ones as David DiBiase (Director of Education) declared on linkedin:
We’re designing the course for tech-savvy people who have skills related to data analysis – spreadsheets, a little statistics perhaps, some appreciation of the problematic nature of measurement and data, and of course fluency with computers and the web. Previous experience with GIS will be helpful but not necessary.
all this esri shit … i feel like the blog is getting worse !
dear noname,
good criticism also is personal so please give me a name. Despite this: ArcGIS and ESRI technology is widespread and at least a thing to deal with for most students all around the world. Personally I feel very sorry, that I cannot offer more tutorials and stuff regarding ESRI technology as we cannot afford a license. We can discuss about ESRI and ArcGIS but this blog is NOT ONLY open source GIS related.
Hi Riccardo,
good to hear that you’re in. I am looking forward to read what the course is all about. I received an email too, but obviously the course was already full. Maybe I subscribed to late.
hi Christoph,
we will try to migrate some stuff from the MOOC to digital-geography.com but I am not sure how detailed this can be. The MOOC will be based on videos, so you will probably see them on youtube or on the ESRi learning channel
Thanks, Riccardo, for covering the new Esri-run MOOC. Sorry that it seems mysterious, but what I can say is that the intent was to test the waters in this first round with a limited audience, make adjustments, and then offer further rounds of the same course. So people who were not admitted this time (like me, as an Esri employee!) will get a chance soon. Why test the waters? This course is based on ArcGIS Online spatial analysis functionality which runs on the (Amazon) cloud, meaning that Esri has real fixed and variable costs associated with each user running analysis!… Read more »
Hi Michael,
thanks for clearing things up. But despite the limited “audience” it is also not common to say nothing about the schedule/content of the MOOC. So ESRI offers limited place for an unknown “training”… This could lead to an unsatisfied audience as the content is not what they expected…
I don’t disagree with you; it would be nice to know more about the contents beforehand. If it makes you feel any better, recently I took an online course (costly) at Stanford U., on entrepreneurship, and the description a priori was equally vague. What to expect in the Esri MOOC? Applications of things such as you see here: http://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/use-maps/perform-analysis.htm