INTEGRATING GIS ACROSS AN EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE CURRICULUM AT A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE: A PROGRESS REPORT

In 2002 the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) at Virginia Wesleyan College embarked on an NSF funded effort to introduce GIS-based labs into most classes in the EES curriculum. Courses include physical geology, environmental geology, oceanography, hydrology, structural geology, and ecology. As a small four-year liberal arts institution, VWC has neither the staffing nor the facilities for an extensive specialized GIS program. Yet the growing importance of GIS in government and industry requires at least some exposure to GIS for graduates to be competitive. Two to six GIS labs in each course allow majors to gain substantial experience using GIS leading up to the single, specialized 300-level GIS course. Because students may take many of these courses in any order, we abandoned the initial plan to introduce GIS manipulations in order of increasing complexity and focused, instead, on using the software to solve the problem that is the subject of the particular lab, regardless of how advanced the manipulations might seem. Examples of such case-based exercises include a) selection of a dam site and calculating the volume of the reservoir and length of time it will take to fill up, b) the delineation of 100-year flood planes using real stream data, c) tracking hurricanes and determining what land areas are most effected, and d) calculating the volume of material removed from Mt. St. Helens in the 1981 eruption. The veracity of the outcomes of many of these exercises may be checked using published results. So far, student evaluations show a high degree of satisfaction. In Environmental Geology, a 100-level course with 6 GIS-based labs, students preferred these labs 3 to 1 over other types, citing the “real-life” nature of the labs and software. Students in the advanced GIS class who have been exposed to the early courses catch on faster than those who had not. Challenges to implementation have included time necessary for faculty to learn the software, the wide range of basic computer skills of students, particularly in introductory classes, and determining when to introduce such fundamental concepts as spheroids and projections.