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Integrating open into geo-education

Byron North
Friday, 5:05pm – 20 min

Whether it is reproducibility in science or accessibility of education worldwide openness seems to be the key. Our lab at North Carolina State University contributed to several courses by introducing open source software not as an alternative, but as something which better achieves the desired goals. We share the teaching materials under CC BY-SA and we are also developing and sharing a dataset to be used in the courses. We recognize that students often relate better to data from the area they live in, so besides the dataset, we created a general schema to build a dataset which can be used with our materials. Now such datasets exist for North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Italy and the Czech Republic. Our lab is an active part of the OSGeo’s GeoForAll research and education network and we are users of resources such as TeachOSM. In my talk I will cover what we have done so far, what we are working on, what are the connections between the educators in the GeoForAll and OSM communities, and what are the general opportunities and impediments when teaching involves open.