Proposal for Planning of a Joint UC-CSU Ed.D. Degree in Geospatial Education
C.M. Rodrigue, Chair, Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach
G.M. MacDonald, Chair, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles
DRAFT
In response to the February, 2003, Request for Proposals by the California State University/University of California Joint Ed.D. Initiative, the departments of geography at CSULB and UCLA request a Planning Grant of $29,402 to support the planning of a new joint Ed.D. degree in geospatial education, the first degree of its kind in the country. The proposed degree program will address the growing mismatch between the burgeoning need for people familiar with geospatial technologies at all levels and the available workforce through the professional development of educators responsible for the production of appropriately trained students and workers: community college instructors, K-12 educational leaders, and workforce training and development managers.
Background: The Need for an Ed.D. in Geospatial Education
GIS and associated technologies (e.g., remote sensing, cartography, and spatial statistics) have put geography "on the map" in business and government. Database management systems and data warehouses are increasingly folded into GIS or incorporate GIS capabilities (e.g., Oracle Locator, IBM Informix Geodetic DataBlade). There is a huge need for a workforce at all levels of industry and government, which applies core competencies in geospatial technologies (Gaudet, Annulis, and Carr 2001). For example, in the State of California alone, the Employment Development Department estimates that GIS specialist jobs, part of their database administrator occupational group, will increase some 67% from 1998 to 2008 (EDD 2002).
The workforce needed and the workforce being produced are very increasingly mismatched (Marble 1997; Plasker 2002; Wittig et al. 1998; Richie et al. 1998). This mismatch is exacerbated by the persistent underrepresentation of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Geography (STEMG) minorities and women in GIS, geography, and the geosciences in general (Rodrigue et al. 2003, slide 4). Salaries for bachelor's graduates in GIS are quite competitive, averaging about $45,000 here on the West Coast (Ratzlaff 2002), so the persistent underrepresentation of minority and female students in the well-paid STEMG fields, including the geospatial technologies, has troubling ramifications if it is not addressed by inclusive efforts to promote these skills and technologies at all levels of the educational system.
The Three Core Constituencies for a Joint Ed.D. in Geospatial Education
Recognizing this need, the very high employability of students trained in geospatial technologies, and their missions as entry-points to higher education for minority students, community colleges everywhere are rushing to create GIS courses and certificate programs. One sign of this development has been articulation problems that have arisen between these burgeoning lower-division community college GIS programs and the generally upper-division GIS programs of the CSU and UC systems. As discussed in the first GIS Articulation Conference held last spring on the CSULB campus, faculty and staff tasked with creating these courses and lab facilities in the community colleges are hungry for more information on GIS and related technologies. This need has been only partially met through the development of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and its Core Curriculum materials and the online courses offered by GIS companies, such as ESRI, MapInfo, and Intergraph. Community college faculty could meet their needs for comprehensive GIS preparation through a regional joint Ed.D. program targeted to them, and many are interested in the training, professionalism, and higher pay that a doctorate would confer, especially a doctorate with an applied educational emphasis.
K-12 educators and school districts, too, have been incorporating these important technologies into K-12 education for the last decade. Indications of the intensity of this interest can be found in the large ESRI Educational Users conferences, the EdGIS listserver that developed from the EdGIS conference series, and the K-12GIS listserver. Examples of GIS use in K-12 education include the Orton Family Foundation Community Mapping Project (http://www.communitymap.org/search/), the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's TORCH Institutes for K-14 teachers, and the Bell County (Texas) GIS School to Work Project http://bellnetweb.brc.tamus.edu/gis/Default.htm). In-service and pre-service educational leaders in this initiative may well be interested in the preparation offered by an Ed.D. in geospatial education as they spearhead the mainstreaming of GIS in their districts and schools.
Similarly, many government agencies at local, State, and Federal levels and private businesses in fields as diverse as petroleum geology consulting, utilities, street atlas production, and marketing are implementing GIS and integrating GIScience into their decision-support processes. This has created an important need to train workforces to learn the software, understand the nature of spatial information, and stay current in this rapidly evolving field. Course developers and course instructors in such businesses and agencies, thus, represent another unserved constituency that would find an Ed.D. in GIS Education eminently practical and desirable if the program could work with their non-traditional scheduling constraints.
The purpose of the proposed Joint CSULB-UCLA Ed.D. in Geospatial Education, then, is to create an outstanding, rigorous Ed.D. program to serve the needs of at least three key populations in the State of California:
§ educational leaders responsible for developing, implementing, and assessing GIS education programs in K-12 schools
§ instructors in community colleges responsible for teaching in or implementing GIS programs
§ workforce development and training specialists in industry and government
A joint Ed.D. program in geospatial education would focus educational efforts to narrow the gap between the GIS workforce needed and the workforce being produced at all levels of the educational system. By supporting the professional development of faculty and administrators in the highly diverse Southern California K-12 educational districts and in the community college systems that are disproportionately the gateway to higher education for underrepresented STEMG minorities, the proposed degree program will increase both the size and the diversity of the geospatial technology student population of the near future and the workforce of the later future. The proposed joint Ed.D. program would, furthermore, bring considerable national visibility to the CSU and UC systems' initiative in identifying and meeting this need and perhaps serve as a model program for institutions in other states.
Joint Ed.D. in Geospatial Education and the Goals of the CSU/UC Joint Ed.D. Initiative
The proposed joint Ed.D. in geospatial education will meet all six goals of the CSU/UC Joint Ed.D. Initiative, as discussed below. The first is established by the nature of the two collaborating departments, while the second grows out of the recognition that the critical social need to be served by the proposed degree is not being met by any existing program in the UC, CSU, or private university systems. Funding at the planning phase is requested in order to carry out activities critical to the last four goals.
The First Goal
The present proposal is to plan the creation of a unique high quality, rigorous Ed.D. program that builds upon a strong scholarly and professional foundation. The proposed degree program would accomplish this goal by bringing together the research strength of the UCLA Department of Geography with the applied research and teacher education strengths of the CSULB Department of Geography to meet a State and national need for the production of a geospatially-literate workforce.
The UCLA department has a prominent reputation in GIS, remote sensing, and quantitative research, and the department has long been rated among the top ten geography doctoral programs in the country (Goldberger, Maher, and Flattau 1995). The CSULB department has an unusual depth and breadth of practical and education-focussed expertise across the geospatial technologies, including GIS, remote sensing, cartography, and quantitative applications, as well as a joint position in geographic education with the Liberal Studies Department. The CSULB department also maintains curricular and research collaborations with the departments of Liberal Studies (in the College of Education) and Science Education (in the College of Natural Science and Mathematics).
The proposed joint Ed.D. in geospatial education would capitalize on the pre-existing CSU-NASA Collaborative, the NASA Regional Earth Science Applications Center housed in the Department of Geography at CSULB, the CSULB GIS Articulation Workshop initiatives, the CSULB department's involvement in the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association's GIS certification project, and its participation in the Statewide articulation-focussed Project IMPAC. It would build on research ties of faculty at both institutions with several NASA earth science, workforce development, and education projects, which have resulted in strong interest by personnel at two NASA centers (JPL and Stennis) in the proposed degree program. It would also complement the GIS professional certification extension program at CSULB and the new professional Masters of GIS degree being implemented at UCLA.
The Second Goal
The goal of the present proposal is to design a doctoral curriculum that will produce educational leaders in the three identified core constituencies, who can apply critical skills of evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and action to advance educational practice in geospatial education in K-12 and community college educational programs and in corporate and governmental agency workforce development and training milieux. Specifically, the proposed joint Ed.D. program in geospatial technologies is to guide in-service and pre-service leaders in education and workforce development in the design, implementation, and assessment of curricula and facilities in GIS and associated technologies.
The proposed joint Ed.D. program in geospatial technologies serves a demonstrated social need for such educational leaders in the State of California, which has not been met within the UC system, the CSU system, or the private universities. Ph.D. programs exist in geography, which provide emphases in geospatial research or which provide experience in the use of these technologies to answer primary research questions, but these are not focussed on the applied needs of the identified core constituencies. They also are premised around the model of the full-time or nearly full-time classic graduate student, not the already employed and perforce part-time or evening/weekends/summer graduate student who would be served by the proposed joint Ed.D. degree program. Master's degree programs related to geography and GIS abound in all three graduate educational systems, but these do not provide the concentration and depth of applied geospatial technology work required to produce independent designers, implementors, and assessors of geospatial education programs and associated hardware and software networks in K-14, government, or industry contexts. Neither do they confer the desired doctoral degree. In short, the needs of the three core constituencies have fallen between the cracks in the graduate educational system of the State of California, denying the State the educational leadership it needs to meet the societal need for a geospatially literate workforce. Only by a collaboration between the doctoral research oriented University of California and the applied and education focussed California State University system can these needs be met.
The Third Goal
The present proposal to fund the planning process will address these statewide needs through a process of collaboration with K-12 and community college leaders, the evaluation of regional needs, and the matching of CSU/UC joint Ed.D. programs with the identified needs. The planning phase will initiate a process of consultation and coöperation with Southern California K-12 and community college educational leaders in GIS education, with industry and government leaders in workforce development, with NASA education and earth science personnel, with faculty from the UCLA departments of Education and Information Studies, and with faculty in the CSULB departments of Liberal Studies and Science Education. This consultation and collaborative research, to be carried out in the first six months of the planning process, will specify and quantify regional needs for geospatial education at all levels and match them with the expertise of participating CSULB and UCLA faculty in the two lead departments and in affiliated departments as necessary to create a focussed joint Ed.D. program in geospatial education that meets the needs of the three core constituencies.
This specification will be worked out in surveys, interviews, and focus groups to be conducted from September 2003 through December 2004, and analyzed from January through April 2004 (Appendix A). Such data-gathering activities will be targeted to in-service community college instructors in Southern California, workforce development personnel in regional corporations (e.g., ESRI and Thomas Brothers) and government agencies (e.g., municipal and regional planning agencies and the State Department of Water Resources), teachers or educational administrators in local K-12 school districts (e.g., the Long Beach Unified School District, the Los Angeles USD, and the Santa Monica-Malibu USD), and interested agencies and associations (e.g., NASA and URISA).
The Fourth Goal
The planning process being proposed here will meet the Joint Ed.D. Initiative goal of developing flexible and affordable methods for program delivery to accommodate the needs of working professionals through alternative scheduling or delivery. Special attention in the needs assessment research will be paid to identifying the scheduling constraints of potential graduate students in the program, given that most of them will be working professionals in education or workforce development.
Participants in the surveys, interviews, and focus groups will be asked their preferred mixes of evening courses and seminars, Friday/Saturday courses, and summer courses, as well as their receptiveness to online courses and hybrids of online and on campus courses. Evening seminars and courses are common on both campuses. Fridays and Saturdays are possibilities on the CSULB campus, as its facilities are almost completely unutilized on Fridays as well as weekends due to the popularity of the Tuesday/Thursday and Monday/Wednesday schedule for its regular undergraduate programs. The Department of Geography there already runs a non-credit extension certificate in GIS on the weekend schedule, demonstrating its tradition of flexibility and willingness to meet the needs of non-traditional students. The UCLA department has developed a professional M.GIS. degree program similarly targeted to non-traditional graduate students. Given that the majority of graduate students in the proposed joint Ed.D. program are expected to be in-service K-14 educators or administrators, the program could also feature summer courses on both campuses. The move of the CSU to a year-round operation model facilitates the creation of summer programs and institutes on that campus. CSULB and UCLA faculty already have experience with totally online (web) and hybrid (BlackBoard- and WebCT-mediated) courses, so distance education delivery of certain courses is a possibility as well. Faculty in both programs will be queried about their willingness to conduct night, weekend, and/or summer courses, in order to identify the range of faculty resources available to mentor Ed.D. students.