Challenges and Opportunities forMassive Open Online Cartographic Education
Anthony C. Robinson, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University
The rapid emergence of user-friendly tools and techniques for making digital maps has caused a drastic shift in the production of maps. Today, the vast majority of new maps are made by cartographic novices. While this development is extremely positive for the visibility and relevance of cartography, engaging novice learner communities to explore and embrace the science and art of cartography is a more critical challenge than ever. We must develop new approaches to teach and encourage basic map design and interpretation skills among groups of mapmakers that are not likely to encounter our practices in formal education settings.
Access to cartographic education has often required face-to-face classroom and laboratory experiences. The iterative nature of cartographic design requires individual-level attention between instructors and learners, and the technical complexity of executing map design has traditionally required specialized equipment and computing infrastructure. Today we see emerging educational approaches and advances in technology platforms that provide new ways for cartographic education to evolve beyond some of these traditional limits on our ability to reach outward to engage broad audiences. Distance learning via the Internet is a mature practice, with well-established quality guidelines and platforms for online engagement. However, traditional distance learning frameworks may break down the friction of distance, but do not address the issue of scale in terms of reaching beyond small class sizes to engage large groups at once.
The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model for distance learning attempts to address the issue of scale by extending distance learning concepts to courses that are built from the ground up to handle tens of thousands of students at once from a global cohort. The fact that MOOCs are free to take helps to ensure that thousands of learners enroll to form these massive cohorts. In 2013 we designed, developed, and taught the first MOOC on Cartography. Our course, called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, launched on the Coursera MOOC platform to an initial cohort of 48,000 students from over 200 countries. In subsequent offerings, the class has continued to draw very large audiences. Here we draw on our experiences teaching and analyzing learner outcomes from the Maps MOOC to identify key challenges and opportunities that face those who wish to expand the reach of cartographic education to broad novice audiences via the web.
Our findings suggest that we can achieve substantial progress with novice learners using MOOCs. Learners in the Maps MOOC are able to successfully create, share, and evaluate original map design projects using free browser-based tools. Peer assessment frameworks for scaling individual map evaluation to a massive cohort are in fact very comparable to expert grading. Discussions of key issues around spatial privacy, storytelling, and change detection through the lens of mapping reveal a vast range of global perspectives. The artifacts and interactions logged by thousands of students studying mapmaking can in turn provide a trove of data from which we can conduct original research to explore learner outcomes in cartographic education. We also note many challenges to the extension of cartographic education through MOOCs. Massive courses are not currently adequate frameworks for supporting the iterative design projects and processes which are so common in cartography. We also find that while web-based GIS tools are more user-friendly and accessible than ever, they offer very limited design affordances and technical challenges are not yet completely solved.
At present, MOOCs are best suited to provide introductory educational experiences in cartography, and not well positioned to support deep engagement in the intricacies of cartographic design. We are nonetheless encouraged that it is possible now to engage thousands of students around the planet to learn fundamental cartographic competencies.