A SURVEY ON THE PRESENT ONLINE EDUCATION OFFERED IN THE FIELD OF CARTOGRAPHY AND GEOINFORMATICS

Abstract

Distance education is a continuously developing concept. The practice for distance education was in the form of open universities long before the Internet. Today, as the Internet has become an everyday tool for a percentage of the young population in the developed and developing world, there are online programs in action to meet the demand for distance education. Most universities are offering, or getting ready to offer, a form of online education. In the fields of Geo-technology (Geomatics, Surveying) and Geography, most of the material contains graphics and images. Additionally, some studies could not be pursued without interactive, supervised exercises. This is the case in many other fields too, where training cannot be achieved by reading only. The graphic material requires large amounts of data to be transferred; which brings the concerns regarding bandwidth, and exercises require efficient interaction – delivering the material is not sufficient in such cases. Cartographic communication also takes a special turn if it has to be on the Internet. For example, in Cartography, colors are used for representing information, and an awareness of what standards are available for color representation for World Wide Web is needed. This paper presents a survey of the available online courses in a number of institutions in the field Geo-technology and Geography with a special focus on Cartography and Geoinformatics. Within the survey, a questionnaire was prepared, a number of institutes were selected and the results were collected either directly from the websites, or by contacting an individual in the group. The conclusions drawn from this survey is aiming to help understanding what is being done today in the name of online education, therefore might be useful for determining the next steps in developing distance education in Geo-technology and Geography education

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Last time updated on 30/10/2017

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