Transcript - September 27, 2011

Hello, and welcome to a closer look at the courses webinar, presented by the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences' geographic information, science and technology online graduate programs. My name is Laura Cibuls, and I'll be hosting this event today. First of all, I'd like to thank everybody for sticking around while we experienced some technical difficulties. Hopefully, it won't occur anymore, and we'll be able to go through this without a hitch. Before we begin, I'm going to take a moment to review what you can expect during the presentation. To cut down on background noise, we've muted participant phone lines.

That means you can hear us, but we can't hear you. If you have any questions, please type them in the Q&A box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen and hit send. Feel free to enter your questions as you think of them. We will try to answer as many as time allows at the end of the presentation. A PDF and a recording of today's presentation will be available to you shortly after the event. Here's a quick look at what we'll be covering today. First, I will introduce you to our faculty members, who will be presenting today: Drs. Jennifer Swift, Karen Kemp and Darren Ruddell. Each faculty member will review their background and give an in-depth look at the required courses they teach.

After we hear from our faculty, Erin and Robyn, our enrollment advisors, will spend a couple of minutes talking about the admissions process and your next steps. We'll wrap up with a quick Q&A session. At USC Dornsife graduate programs in geographic information, science and technology, we currently offer two programs for our students to choose from: a Master degree program and a graduate certificate program. Both of these programs have the same three required courses: 581 – Concepts in Spatial Thinking; 582 – Spatial Databases; and 587 – GPS and GIS Field Techniques.

Today, those who are teaching these courses have agreed to talk to us about what perspective students can expect from these courses, including course descriptions, what the reading assignments will be like, and a brief review of final projects. Our first presenter today is Dr. Jennifer Swift, assistant professor of SSI at USC. Hello, Dr. Swift, and thank you so much for joining us.

Hello. Am I on?

You are.

Okay. I'm Jennifer Swift. I'm an assistant professor in the Spatial Sciences Institute, here at USC. We're really excited about having the opportunity to talk with everybody in this webinar. My educational and research background is primarily in the earth sciences and related information technology. My education includes geology, geochemistry and geophysics. I started utilizing GIS programs in school, in my research, during my Ph.D. Since then, I've had a lot of good fortune. I've utilized many different GIS software packages, from open source to proprietary. My early scientific research was concentrated on the North Anatolian Fault, in Turkey, which is similar in structure and nature to the San Andreas Fault here in California.

My very first use of GIS was to study the soil behavior beneath the old Sea of Istanbul, which used to be called Constantinople. I've been teaching in spatial sciences since the early 2000s. I've also been an employee of an environmental consultants group, which is now part of the company URS. Just prior to coming to USC, I was a faculty member in Bosporus University in Istanbul, and at USC, I was research faculty in the department of civil engineering for many years, and only recently moved to Spatial Sciences Institute to become full-time teaching faculty. Next slide. So today, I'm going to talk about Geography 581 – Concepts for Spatial Thinking.

But first, I'd like to give a quick overview of the classes, whether it's a certificate or a Master's degree, we utilize online, browser-based tools, like Blackboard, and we put – all the course materials and class correspondence are posted throughout the duration of the course online. Of course, we also utilize email. On a Blackboard, for instance, for any particular course, there'll be discussion boards and blogs, and it gives us a great opportunity to continuously work together. We also, in every class, include separate virtual meetings and presentations. We use Adobe Connect and Skype. We have synchronous video interaction sessions. These – sometimes, these are one-on-one, and sometimes these are small groups.

For Geography 581 – this course was originally designed as an introduction to GIS. This is one of the – basically, the main introductory course into the whole program. It's very – we consider it a very important class. We get students who are just taking it to see if they like the program, if they like GIS, and if they want to continue. It's a very basic – fundamental concepts are covered in this class, related to spatial thinking and spatial concepts. It was recently re-developed by one of our core faculty who's here today, Karen Kemp. There has also been lots of other contributions to it, including Tarak Rashad, Darren Ruddell and myself.

It was originally designed as an introduction to GIS, and it involves learning cartographic and spatial concepts which underlie GIS. It's a good choice for anybody who's considering getting seriously involved in GIS, since we first need to understand all of the underlying concepts. We assume that entering students have no previous experience or knowledge about GIS or spatial thinking. We also assume that it's gonna – in terms of how much time it would be required to take this class, you would want to allocate a minimum of ten hours a week to taking this class and perhaps other classes. We begin the course by focusing on basic concepts that are fundamental to understanding geographic knowledge and how to communicate it and how you depict it in a computer.

In particular, of course, we use GIS. You will gain that basic concepts and basic understanding of cartography, working with spatial information, because these concepts are really an important foundation to simply understanding all of the possibilities for using GIS, and how we can use it as a tool to represent and manage data around us. So it touches on basic concepts like cognition, mental representations of space, and understanding meaning in maps. Most of the class concentrates on fundamentals in our field. We look at geographic data in very basic ways, to analyze it, and we focus on basic concepts that are fundamental to understanding the nature of geographic knowledge.

So when you've completed this course, you will be able to explain how spatial thinking is one of the basic human intellectual processes and how we use it in our everyday lives, how spatial concepts make maps become powerful communication tools. We'll talk about geographic information slants and explain how it forms the basis of GIS and how it's relevant to other scientific disciplines because GIS is relevant to a myriad of other disciplines, not just geography. It really is applicable to many of the other sciences and humanities.

You'll know how to name and explain the components that make up GIS systems, how to describe geospatial data models and how these are used to represent geographic phenomena and evaluate, for instance, the appropriateness of different models for specific applications of GIS. We use ArcGIS in this class, and we use it as a tool. It's the GIS program we use. We learn how to input and explore geospatial data and to perform basic analytical procedures. You'll learn how to make really nice maps. So a big part of this course is also – it involves a very structured, hands-on introduction to the GIS software, in the form of tutorials, in particular with the Esri's ArcGIS.

Next slide. So the course is structured into weekly reading and reading notes. The other courses also have a similar structure. We use two texts: GIS Fundamentals, by Bolstad, and a GIS tutorial workbook – a new one by Gorr and Kurland, which is a hands-on workbook. Also, there'll be a number of additional related articles. Weekly or bi-weekly, you'll work on GIS tutorials on ArcGIS desktop. We use other desktop tools _____ GIS, called ArcGIS online and Base Maps. Next slide. Now, this is my final slide. What I'm gonna talk about is the 581 final project. All the classes involve some sort of final project, where you independently need to utilize all of the information that you learned during the semester and create your own final project.

These are our – you're able to choose what you would like to do. So you'll work on these individual GIS projects. This really gives you an opportunity to work on an unstructured problem, such as you'd face in the real world. In particular, in 581, we ask each student to conduct what's called a site suitability analysis, utilizing GIS. You – basically, what you have is you have several weeks to put together a project, through a series of assignments, which includes a draft proposal, statements of interest about what you want to do for your project, data report, which outlines spatial data that you'll use in your project, and it all culminates in this final project presentation that you give in, probably, a small group setting, and a formal report that you turn in to your instructor.

The first step in working on a final project is to learn about concept of a site suitability analysis. What is it? It's basically a form of spatial decision-making process. It refers to analytic or systematic approach to make a decision about the suitability of a site or location for a given purpose. So the decision, in this case, comes in the form of a choice you would make about a desired site that attains your usage objective. So in the context of a project, for example, a site suitability analysis would involve determining the best location to site a manmade or natural spatial entity or process, like a new house, a school, a coffee shop, airport, a farm. The choices are pretty much limitless.

The main objective is for you to gain experience using your GIS skills and tools you learned in the course. You'll design it and perform it in what is, today, a very common type of spatial problem-solving skill, site suitability analysis, which is often required in academia and government industry. It's a good job skill. So with that, I'd like to sign off. I will be really happy to answer any questions about 581 that anyone has at the end of the webinar. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Swift. Now, our next presenter today is Dr. Karen Kemp, professor of practice of spatial sciences at USC. Hello, Dr. Kemp. Thank you for joining us today.

Hello, and good morning from where I am. I'm, I think, probably the senior professor in our program, by counting years, so I've got a rather long list of things I could say about my background. But basically, I am a geographer. All of my degrees are in geography. Once I finally got my Ph.D., I went on to a number of other jobs. Before I came to USC, I was running a similar program at University of Redlands, although it was a face-to-face program. Lots of publications, but probably the most impressive-sounding one is my editing of the Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science.

I'm pretty well known, and I know lots of people around the world in our field, so that's one of the fun things I like to do, in my courses, is to drop in a little bit of my own personal experience with authors, or meetings where these topics were first discussed and things like that. I try to put as much of that I can into the materials. I'm interested in lots of things – slightly different things since I moved to Hawaii. Next slide, please. I just put this slide in because I wanted all of you to know that while many of our students are distance, I am also at a distance. So USC's way over there on the other side of the ocean, and I live in Hawaii. So, in fact, even this morning, if you hear my chickens, you're not hearing things.

I live on a farm and teach from my lanai. It's kind of a fun thing, but it all works the same, so it really doesn't matter where you are. We all connect in various ways. Next slide, please. So my course that I'm talking about today is the Geography 582, called Spatial Databases. This is one of the required courses. It's actually unusual for such a course to be required in a GIS program, as many people tend to forget that GIS – Geographic Information Systems – are information systems. In order to really get your fingers dirty in this technology, you really do need to understand the foundations of information systems. One of the interesting things I like about teaching this class is that the idea of an information system is that it actually models the world, as this little graphic shows.

You have the whole world out there. It's not digital. The challenge is to think about what's important in the world, and then to put that information into the computer in such a way that you can actually, then, make maps and analyze and do all the things we do in GIS. So information systems have been around quite a bit longer than geographic information systems. There's rather a large body of knowledge that we don't go much into. We just skim across the surface, but it's a useful introduction to how that works. So we start with looking at information systems and database theory, in general – not too deep. It's not scary. Then, we go on to the more interesting part about how we actually, then, take geography and put it into a database.

So in this course, your goal is to both acquire the practical skills you need to actually create a database for geographic information, and then to use it. That's paired with gaining the knowledge that you need to understand the ways you can represent the world in a database, and specifically with geospatial data. Next slide, please. So as Jen said, my course structure is similar. We have several components. This first slide talks of the readings, which form the basis of the course. It's our lectures. The way these readings, with the reading notes, are set up is the readings are as you would do in a normal, face-to-face class. You read a chapter.

The reading notes provide you the annotation to those notes – how to interpret parts, which parts are really important, you really should pay attention to this, take note of this particular statement, that sort of thing. So it makes the notes come alive, I think, a bit more than you just sort of working your way through them in a boring way. We use two textbooks in this course – at least, this is – at the moment, although everything's always shifting a little bit as new opportunities arise. But at the moment, we use a rather large, dense book called Spatial Database Systems, and read through that with these reading notes, so the dense stuff is – we direct you through the dense stuff.

Then, a nice book from Esri, called Modeling Our World, which is fairly light. So the two match nicely together. Then, where these two books don't cover the ground, we add in a few additional articles. Next slide, please. Thank you. So we have the readings, and then we have the assignments, which is your chance to apply everything. Basically, in this course, they're bi-weekly written assignments, where you explore the theory that's in the reading and apply them to something relevant to you. So you take the theory and work it around a little bit to apply it to a topic of interest to you. In this course, as in most of our courses, you generally have the opportunity to identify a topic you are interested in and focus your activities – your writings and your assignments – into that area.

So it's a way for you to explore how these particular theoretical points play out specifically in the area that you are most interested in. In addition to the written assignments, we have hands-on tutorials. We take a look at both non-spatial and spatial database technology because spatial database is, at its base, non-spatial. There's a lot out there – Oracle and SQL Server and My SQL. If you know any of those words, those are all the traditional non-spatial, though they all have spatial components now. So we play around with both of those. Then, the last part of the assignments is some online discussions, where we review postings by other students.

I think that amounts to the main assignments. Next. Then, of course, as Jan said, we have a final project. In this class, you get a chance to design and create a geodatabase in ArcGIS for this area of interest. So when you do that, the idea is – as I mentioned initially – is to conceptually model the world in the structure that we learn in this class, which you can see behind here with a bunch of little boxes. Those are all different parts of a database table all linked together. This is a rather complex model. You probably won't do quite so much, and it's probably better if you don't. But basically, you decompose the world and build yourself a conceptual model of the parts of the world that are of interest to you, as you might put them into the computer.

You create a diagram, such as the one in the back. Then, you implement a very small prototype of the model, having learned that in the course. Finally, and most importantly, you present your model to your design committee, which actually is me, as if it were the preliminary design that you're trying to provide to your group, so that the group can then go forward and improve it. That presentation is done publicly, within the class, so every student is invited to attend everybody else's presentations. Last slide – or next slide; I think I have two. Then, the last part of our course structure is the faculty and student interaction. So we have opportunities for students to talk with a professor, mostly to discuss the project ideas, as they develop.

So it helps you articulate your idea into the framework of the course. We have blog postings, which are the journal reviews that I mentioned before and some other things. Those are always a really interesting opportunity to see what other students have discovered, in terms of interesting articles, and to explore some of your personal experiences with – in relation to those things. Then, we have lots of discussion forums, which are a very important part of this course. Students often comment on how useful it has been to share ideas and progress and problems and fixes and other information and examples through the discussion forums, which you will see when you try it.

Last slide, I think. Yeah, I added in here – this is too much to read, of course – way too much words for a slide – but I browsed through some of the comments that I get after my courses are done. I thought it was useful to bring some of these up because spatial databases sounds pretty dry. It is, in a way, and yet it's very exciting because, as this first student said, "From this course, I learned how to take a step back and look at the database as a whole, and then logically put the pieces together. Creating a conceptual framework of how it all goes together is such a great strategy." As the next one said, "I have chosen GIS as my career, and I thought I knew everything there was about database structure and how it worked."

I think that's a really important indicator of what this course gives. Everybody knows how to put a shape file into a box, but this one explains why you would choose a shape file and which box you're gonna put it in." Just to brush off the GIS experts, another comment from one of my students from the other side of the spectrum, who said, "I am mainly a qualitative researcher, so I'm not an expert on GIS, but this class helps me to be able to thoughtfully engage with my colleagues – the colleagues I am working with who are the experts."

So it is an excellent foundation, an unexpected treat, provides you some really deep awareness of how GISs are structured and a good foundation for taking control of your own project work and do a very credible, professional-looking job of things. I think that's my last slide, so I'll hand it over to Darren.

Thank you so much, Dr. Kemp. Our last faculty member joining us today is Dr. Darren Ruddell, lecturer in geography at USC. Thank you, Dr. Ruddell, for joining us. I will let you take the presentation.

Great. Thank you, Laura. Can everyone hear me? I just want to make sure.

Yes, we're able to hear you.

Okay, great. Well, thank you very much. It's a great opportunity to be here and to be speaking with a number of potential students interested in our program. My research interests are in geospatial technologies, urban sustainability and climate change. I completed my Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2009, and I recently joined the Spatial Sciences Institute as faculty, as part of the GIS program. I also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, Africa from 2000 to 2002. I'm happy to talk with anyone that's interested in having a one-on-one conversation later on, but today, what I'm gonna speaking about is our course Geography 587, which is the GPS/GIS Field Techniques.

There are four particular talking points that I'd like to cover in this presentation. The first is the course objectives. Next, I want to spend a couple minutes talking about required materials. Then, I want to discuss some of the assignments and evaluation for the course. Then finally, the capstone component of this course is the Catalina Island field trip. Next slide, please. So the course objectives are to acquire knowledge and skills to source, test and evaluate data for GIS-based research. We accomplish these goals by examining the state of the field in the literature, and we also accomplish these goals by examining primary and secondary data sources.

Over the course of the semester, we'll examine and evaluate data needs and data types, investigate some of the potential sources of error in the data that we're examining. We'll also examine some various data sources. So in addition to the data that we provide you to complete some assignments, there's also opportunities to source and identify your own data. So we'll spend some time investigating some of those various data sources. Another key component of this course is examining data quality, management and control. One of the key themes of this class is to examine the fitness for use for a given dataset. So depending on these temporal and spatial scale of analysis for a particular research project, it's important to select the appropriate datasets to most effectively investigate that research topic.

So we'll spend a little time examining the fitness for use. Next slide, please. There are a few items required for this course. Some of the requirements: we have three textbooks. Two of the textbooks overlap with Dr. Swift's course, 581. So GIS Fundamentals, by Paul Bolstad, as well as the GIS Tutorial Workbook, will be working in parallel with 581. The third book that you see listed here, The Handbook of Geographic Information Science, is a rich, informative book on GIS. That particular book is required for this course but, of course, it informs the other courses, so Dr. Kemp's course on databases, the field methods course and a number of other courses.

So those are the three texts that we use for this particular class. The other requirement for this course is that you take a week out of your schedule and you spend this week on Catalina Island conducting fieldwork and data analysis. Next slide, please. This course has a variety of activities and assignments to evaluate your progress and comprehension with course concepts. Just like the first two courses that we heard about this morning, we'll have a number of reading assignments in this class. So we'll assign reading, and then we'll have some type of response or reflection summary for a particular reading assignment. The other component of this course is completing ArcGIS assignments, so we'll have some workbook activities, hands-on GIS activities that you will complete.

There's also the Catalina Island field project. This is a self-directed field project, typically working in groups. This is all self-contained. So we go to Catalina Island; we carry out the research project. There's three components that you're evaluated on, and everything will be completed during that one-week field trip. When you leave Catalina Island, we'll carry on with the next assignment for the class, so everything will begin and end on Catalina Island. But of course, those ideas and concepts are gonna be reinforced throughout the course of the semester. The fourth component of this course is the research papers. There's two papers that we will conduct over the course of the semester.

One is due about at the midway point of the semester, and then the last research project is a capstone assignment. That will combine all the skills over the course of the semester, and that will be what you'll submit as the final assignment for the course. Next slide, please. So I also want to take a moment and discuss the Catalina Island field trip. Typically, the field trip occurs during the middle of the semester. So for this particular semester – for fall – it starts next week, so that'll be Week 7 and Week 8 of our semester. That's typically the window when the Catalina Island field trip is scheduled. So Catalina Island is located off the coast of Los Angeles.

It's about 20 miles south of USC, and then about 20 miles off of the coast of southern California. We spend one week at USC's Wrigley Institute of Environmental Research. This is a great component of the course. It ties all the concepts and materials together, and it's also a great opportunity to meet your colleagues and to meet faculty supporting the GIS program. So we spend one week on Catalina Island, and then we return to the mainland, typically on a Sunday. So it's Monday we begin, and then Sunday we travel back to Los Angeles. One other thing that we're also offering as part of the trip to Catalina Island is a tour of the USC campus.

So on Sunday, we'll return to campus – we'll return to Los Angeles – return to the port – and then we'll offer an optional tour of the Spatial Sciences Institute and the campus. Next slide, please. There are three primary learning outcomes during this weeklong field trip. The first is to gain comprehension with the hardware. So when we're talking about the hardware, we're thinking about our laptops that we'll be using, as well as our GPS units. We're also trying to gain comprehension with software – the software programs that support the hardware. So we've got to make sure that we understand the communication between these different technologies.

Then, the third component of this weeklong field trip is to gain confidence and experience conducting a research project. So during this one-week field trip, each person will be a part of a group and will conduct a self-directed research project. During this time, we'll be thinking about what are the methodologies that we'll need to use to carry out the project? What are some of the limitations and assumptions inherent in the research project? Then, what are the findings and conclusions? So it's a great opportunity to gain experience and confidence conducting research projects. I'd also like to mention that each person will be issued their own laptop and GPS unit that they'll have the entire work.

The GPS units that we're using are furnished by Trimble, so the Trimble Nomad handheld GPS units. They are some of the most advanced GPS units that are currently available today. Next slide, please. So there's really exceptional resources as part of the Wrigley Institute of Environmental Research at Catalina Island. On the campus – the field station campus – there's a computer lab, a library, the cafeteria. There's a whole staff in place to support students and staff that are working on various research projects on Catalina Island. So in the image, here, you can see that this is our library and our computer work environment. I mentioned the GPS units that we'll be using.

That's a picture of one, on the right. The accommodations on Catalina Island are also nice. We have – each person is typically assigned to have a roommate, and two people share a nice room that is furnished with full linens. It has a microwave, as well as a refrigerator. We have the cafeteria, which serves three meals a day. There's also laundry facilities, so you don't necessarily need to pack ten days' worth of clothing. You can pack a lighter amount, and then be able to do your laundry while you're on Catalina Island. Next slide, please. So in addition to a full work schedule, there will be opportunities for outdoor recreation and some field trips.

Two particular field trips that we'll make while on Catalina Island is to a town just nearby, Two Harbors. So we'll get to spend some time at Two Harbors. There's also the western cliffs. So one of the days during the week, we'll drive over to the western cliffs. It's a beautiful view of the coastline, and we can spend a little time maybe doing some hiking or just taking some pictures or just taking a break during the week. There's also opportunities to go kayaking or mountain biking or hiking, so this is a great opportunity to balance some of your time. You'll have time to carry out your research investigation, but also some personal time to relax and to recreate.

Everyone completing this course seems to have a really great experience. Next slide, please. So that completes the description of Geography 587. Now, I would like to mention a few key points that distinguish the GIS program at USC. The first point is that you will receive expert training while enrolled in the GIS program. Each of our faculty members has a Ph.D. in their respective field, and we are constantly evaluating the field of GIS to offer the most cutting edge and foundational courses. Also, we have a very diverse faculty supporting the GIS program. Dr. Swift – her Ph.D. is in geology. Dr. Kemp and myself – we both have Ph.D.s in geography.

Other faculty members have their Ph.D. in computer science, environmental studies, and so we have a rich interdisciplinary cohort. So I think that helps diversify the program and offers expertise in whatever topic you may be interested in investigating during your certificate or Master's program. Another advantage of this program is that it's very flexible, so you can complete this program at your own pace. If you want to take one course per semester or two courses or three courses, that's something that you can decide. Another advantage of this course is that we have – we offer small class sizes, so each course is capped at 20 students.

This provides a lot of support – or a lot of opportunities for faculty to support the students. So we have a relatively class size, so you can communicate with your colleagues, and also to receive the attention and feedback from your faculty members. Another important component of this program is that we have a number of interactions with faculty, so we create these various opportunities for faculty and students to interact. So one environment is to have online meetings via Skype, Adobe Connect, and our webinar today is another example of opportunities to interact. We also have in-person meetings. This can take place on campus. We also organize some type of social event at least once, sometimes twice, per semester.

Then, we also have the Catalina Island field trip. So enrolling in the GIS program at USC also makes you a part of the Trojan family. USC is a top-tier research and teaching university and offers a diverse research and learning environment. We are confident you will find your experience in the GIS program to be intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding. We look forward to helping you achieve your academic and professional goals while working through the GIS program. So that completes my component. I'd like to turn it over to Laura to discuss some of the last few slides.

Thank you, Dr. Ruddell. I'd finally like to introduce our enrollment advisors, Erin and Robyn, to you, who will take a moment to explain the admissions requirements and what you can expect during the enrollment process.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you now, Robyn.

Our applicants must have a Bachelor's degree from a regionally accredited university, a minimum undergraduate GPA of 3.0, a minimum GRE score 1,000 for the Master of Science in GIS, but that is not required for the graduate certificate. You may begin your classes in any of the three semesters, spring, summer or fall. The application process, itself, is very simple. It consists of an official application. There is a one-time, non-refundable $85.00 application fee. We ask for your current resume, a personal statement, two letters of recommendation, your official GRE scores, and official transcripts from all colleges and universities attended.

Thank you so much, Robyn. Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we've come to the end of our presentation. I see that we do have a few questions, so I'll present them to our panelists, and we'll see how many we can address in the time we have left. Our first question that I see is since there are both GIS professionals and non-GIS professionals in the two programs, are there classes that are geared for either type of professional person?

I'd like to answer that. This is Karen Kemp. Yes, absolutely. In fact, it's great when we get GIS professionals in the course. Because the programs – the courses are quite flexible, there's a lot of room for you to take the material into the areas where it benefits you most. So on the one hand, you can actually get a release from the 581 class if you can demonstrate that you have already taken that material and that you already know GIS. We do have a way of getting you out of 581, which is the introductory class. I, personally, don't know of any other students who have had any other releases because all the other courses provide material that is enrichment to you, no matter what your level of expertise.

As I said just a minute ago, you can take that material to the next level because you're learning the material in your own context, and every student gets to apply it to their own interest area. So when you start researching that topic into your own research area, then you take it into the new territory. Hopefully, that answered your question.

Thank you so much. I have a question regarding – SQL was mentioned. Can you give an idea of how much coding we will learn?

Good question. I guess that one's mine. Very little. The objective in the database class – now, this isn't talking about the programming class, which is a separate class – but in the databases class, basically it's just an introduction to SQL because most people don't know anything about SQL. So we introduce people to the concepts of SQL. We do have an exercise in which you have to actually create a database using SQL, so those people who have never coded and don't know how to do it, you are directed in the right direction. Those who have coded and know how to do it can take it, again, to the next level. So we recognize the different levels of skills, in terms of programming.

You do have to do some coding because you have to learn how to do that, but it's not something that prevents everyone from getting their work done if they're not familiar with it.

I'll just add a little bit to that. In the programming classes, Web GIS and 586, desktop programming, you will use the basic SQL and build upon that in learning how to do those types of programming, as well.

Thank you. I have another question. Are there areas of expertise that focus on water resources, transportation, or are the courses more generalist?

Let me jump in on that one, since I'm not muted. Yes, the courses are generalist on purpose. That's the way we approach this program. However, as I've said several times, students come in with an interest area, and some students come in with a specific "this is what they're trying to do" thing. Actually, we get a lot of transportation students in the program, who come on campus from our engineering department. So we don't teach – we do not have a course in GIS for water resources or GIS for transportation. But, for example, in the database class, we have a section on network structure, so you can learn how to do networks. In my spatial analysis class, we have a section on network analysis.

So we touch on the topics, and the depth comes from your project work and your specific choices of articles to read and that sort of thing. We just don't have enough magnitude to have individual courses on these topics, but I believe that we're getting there by giving you the freedom to take the course into your specific interest area.

Can I add something to that, please?

Yeah, definitely.

I just also want to mention that if there is a student with a particular research interest, they can also ask the faculty member if they can tailor their – say their final research project – their site suitability analysis or their capstone research project on a particular topic. As long as it fulfills the requirements, there should be no reason they can't choose that particular topic to carry out their investigation. So if the student does have a particular area that they want to focus on and specialize in, they can continue to investigate that in these courses. So I think that's one of the advantages of providing some general guidance for our classes, but also providing the flexibility for students to target in on the topics of their interest.

I'll add one other thing to that one. There's a lot of intercommunication in the classes. So what you'll do in these online classes is you'll meet people with a similar interest. There's a wide variety of people from different disciplines, but you'll meet people – other people from other locations interested in transportation and things like that. We encourage the students to communicate and even share data and get to know each other and work together.

Great. I have a couple of questions that are popping up regarding who people should use as references. I'm not sure who would want to take that question.

I think that's kind of a Kate Kelsey question. I think that they want to get academic or work-related references from places either – people who they've studied with for some time or people that they've worked with for some time, I think.

You're absolutely correct. You can use either professional or academic references for your letters of recommendation.

Thank you so much for covering that, Robyn. I have a couple of questions regarding if the degree for the Master's program will say online or if it'll just be like all the other on-campus degrees?

The degree makes no mention of being earned online.

Okay, thank you. At this time, I'd like to – I know each of the panelists can see questions that are popping up quite quickly, and I want to know if there's any of them that they want to address at this time.

I'd like to add one more thing to that. Their diploma will not say online. It's a Master's degree from USC, just as any other Master's degree. There was a question from Steve Street, I think, about do students need to purchase ArcGIS. What we have is we have a great online system that we just vastly upgraded this fall, where we deliver all of the software – not just ArcGIS, but all of the software used in the classes ____ Visual Studio or other software – through the browser. It's a browser-based system. We use VMware and Citrix, which streams it directly to the students' computers. So they can use any computer, as long as they can access their browser. They log in, and they can use the software, so it's using the resources from the server. They don't have to pay for any of that. That comes with the course.

Thank you.

I'd also just like to mention that all the data are available through that environment, as well. So the software and the data to complete assignments is all provided online. There's one question I'd like to mention – or to answer – that was posted by John Marshall. This question here talks about the software that we use for the GPS/GIS class. So the question here asks about are we use ArcPad, TerraSync, other software? So for the GPS unit, we use TerraSync, so the Nomad is supported by TerraSync. Then, we use Pathfinder to transfer the data from the GPS unit to the laptop, and then we also use Pathfinder to differentially correct the data. Then, after differential correction, we export it to ArcGIS, and then that's when we conduct the analysis. We do that in Esri's ArcGIS. So we use TerraSync, Pathfinder, and then Arc.

Thank you. There seems to be a couple of questions regarding how many courses there are for each of the programs. If somebody could review that quickly, that'd be very appreciated.

The certificate program consists of four classes. The Master's degree program will be six classes plus the thesis.

Thank you. We have a couple more questions regarding if all of the classes are online or are there on-campus options?

No, there are no on-campus options. Individually, we instructors who are local, we have office hours and sometimes we have meetings here for local students. Kate Kelsey, the student program advisor, tries to put as many local students in the faculty who are on campus as possible in those sections, so they can come. But it's – the entire program is online, with the exception of the one week in Catalina that's required.

I'd like to emphasize that the off-campus students are in no way disadvantaged, which is the reason why I wanted to make the point about me being off campus. You're more than welcome to come to Hawaii and visit me in my office, but I haven't yet had a student come and visit. It makes no difference. You can communicate with me almost as easily as you can with Jen and Darren and everyone else who's in LA. We have technologies that allow us to communicate directly, face to face. There's Skype, for example, but we have other technologies – Adobe Connect – where we can share our desktops, and I can look at what your problems are.

It's as good as being in the classroom, being in the lab, and certainly, there's a lot more flexibility, as far as time goes, so that you don't have to depend on that one little lab section to have your chance to ask a question. It's 24/7, in terms of asking questions. I have to admit it's not 24/7, in terms of answering questions, but we have a very dynamic process here, and I believe no one feels the lack of not being in LA.

Karen's absolutely right. Even among the local students, a lot of them work full time. LA is huge and horrible to commute, and they don't want to come to campus, so they do Skype; they do Adobe Connect; and it works great for them.

Thank you so much. It looks like we're come to a close. I don't want to run over because everybody has such busy schedules. But if we haven't gotten to your question, our enrollment advisors will definitely be getting back to you shortly. At this time, I'd like to conclude today's session and thank everybody for coming out and listening to our webinar. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our enrollment advisors, Erin and Robyn. You can now see their contact information on the screen now. They will have a recording and a PDF of this event available later on. Probably, the recording will be available next week, but a PDF will be available immediately. Once again, thanks, everybody, for showing up. I'm sorry about all the problems we had with the listening earlier today, and I hope you got a lot out of this. Have a great day.

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