This summer I was asked to teach a 10 week course on Open Sourc
e GIS at the University of Maryland, College Park as part of their
Master of Professional Studies in Geospatial Information Sciences Program. This will be a hybrid course where some of it is held on campus, while the rest is an online course.
Having some lectures on campus is a great way to get everyone on the same page and also have the maximum amount of interactions, while having a large portion of the course online will enable working professionals and others to complete the course in the comfort of their own homes.
Another great thing about teaching a class on open source GIS is that you can download all the software for free to use on your own devices. As you can see from the poster below, we’ll be learn about Desktop GIS with QGIS, Enterprise GIS with Postgres/PostGIS, Internet Map Servers with Geoserver, and script processing with GDAL. This is really a great way to learn about open source GIS with others, discover how it might get used within your organizations, and get 3 college credit from a leading University.
So, if you are a student who is home for the summer looking to learn about open source GIS and earn some credits toward your degree, a GIS professional wondering if open source GIS will work in your organization, or someone who has dabbled in open source GIS and wants to learn more about it, please consider taking the course – and don’t hesitate to comment below if you have any questions.
To learn more about the course, please email the UMD GIS program at geog-gis@umd.edu.
