All right, thank you. I am an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. And I just finished my first year. So this is my idea for a framework for open access GIS

course resources. And I've put a name on it now. I've called it LibreGeo. So this project for me is motivated by my experience as a first year assistant professor preparing course materials for multiple geospatial courses.

And that was by far the most time consuming part of my job, more than research, a little bit more than service. But it was really frustrating knowing that the person who was in the job previously, for me, was probably going through the same thing. And I knew other people who were going through the same thing. And that it takes a ton of time to create high quality course materials like lab

exercises and activities. And I've started doing these more short little activities in class where I'll give the students some instruction, have them follow along with me in a program. And that gives me some of the most bang for the buck because it's more interactive. It's not just me lecturing. And they like that a lot. But it takes a lot of time.

Also too, course textbooks are really expensive. And in my opinion, as soon as you print a GIS textbook, that's really problematic because the software changes so fast, it can be obsolete really quickly. So because of that, I think it's nice to have course materials that are all online, if possible. And also too, from my experience,

I've never found a textbook that works perfectly for my needs. So I teach a GIS 3 course to undergrads, which I basically teach as kind of like a spatial data science course, where I use R primarily. But my department also wants to see a little bit of ArcGIS Pro. And then I have some other things that I want to introduce. So I kind of pull from three or four different textbooks.

So one single textbook has never really worked out for me. Individual course requirements are going to vary quite a bit from person to person. So talk about what the project is not. I don't see this as being a replacement for conceptual textbooks. I think there are some great resources already out there that have stood the test of time.

When I talk about spatial statistics in my GIS 2 class, some of the methods that we're using there were developed in the early 1900s by a college at the University of Nebraska. So those methods haven't changed a whole lot. Of course, new methods do come out. But this is a good one that I've drawn upon in the past. There's also essentials of geographic information systems

that I reference. These are more conceptual textbooks. They're not software-based, but not meant to replace these. And also, it's not meant to be a drag and drop replacement for certain GIS courses. So I have all of the course materials in a Git repository. It's not like you just fork the repository

and then you're done preparing materials. It's more of kind of like a mix and match, select what works for you, sort of approach. So it's designed to be a repository for GIS course materials. And the focus is particularly on in-class activities, out-of-class exercises like laboratories,

and then also tutorials. And I want this to be as interactive as possible. Since the materials are all stored on the web, that opens up some interesting opportunities for interactivity. This is my vision for the project. I also have this idea that it could potentially be software-agnostic if we're wanting to focus more

on teaching the concept. So have a lab exercise that's geared towards the concept that could be applied to multiple GI systems. I don't know if that's really realistic with the state of GIS right now. Maybe it would be wise to have some that are software-agnostic, some modules agnostic, and then others that focus on particular software packages.

And there are a few sources that I kind of draw inspiration from. With Gitbook and GitLab, GitHub, this actually makes the ability to kind of crowdsource textbooks and crowdsource books. It just makes that possible.

So one that I really like is the blogdown book that was created by a few employees at RStudio, and then also one that I'm using in one of my GIS classes, the Geo-Computation with RBook. It's headed up by Robin Loveless. And if we click on this, it'll go to that repository.

Let's see. And you can see here that there are 40 contributors, which is actually one more than the last time that I checked this. And I think that's great for GIS course materials. If we could all be sharing our resources and editing each other's stuff and hold it in one central repository, I think that would be awesome.

So that's part of my, let's see here. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

I tried to use Alt-Arrow to go back to the previous one. Let's try again.

What's up? Yeah, I'm trying this Alt-Up, Alt-Down.

I don't know if anybody has any ideas here. Joe, what was the key combo that you said to get to the windows? Oh, OK.

This is just a web browser here. OK, there we go. All right, not going to try that one again.

OK, OK. Yeah, I actually opened a new window instead of going to a different window, so I just need to go back here to the previous if I can find my mouse. OK. OK, there we go. All right, so another place that I draw inspiration from

is the status bars of tiling window managers. So this one might be a little bit off the wall, but I have experimented with probably 10 or 12 different tiling window managers over the past several years, mostly with i3 and with QTile. And I've settled on QTile, but I love this approach where there are a bunch of different modules

that you can pick from to put in your status bar, the little mode line at the bottom of your computer. You pick the ones that work for you. You exclude the ones that don't. So as we go through this little config file here, you can see a couple of things. I have one that displays the screen number when I'm on a multi-screen system, and another one that

shows the amount of CPU usage, and then one that shows the amount of memory usage, the audio volume, and then the clock formatted how I want. And then when I'm on my laptop, I have one that shows the battery life as well. So hundreds of different modules to choose from, and you just select the ones that work. Or if you don't see one that meets your needs,

you can kind of create it on your own. So I take this approach too with GIS course materials. So currently, the way that I am storing and serving out materials is through this combo of R Markdown, Blogdown, and Hugo. This is kind of a way that you can use R to host a static web page.

And from my understanding, the Hugo web framework was designed originally for blogs, but now it's used for tons of different sites. I like this Learn theme, which I'll show you in just a second. It's designed specifically for documentation, which I think works well for course materials because it makes things searchable. And then I'm hosting everything on GitLab using GitLab pages.

Originally, when I came up with this idea, I thought that I would be creating Vagrant files that people would modify, and then everybody would be spinning up their remote server on AWS or Leno or DigitalOcean or whatever. But I think that was overkill, and GitLab pages has turned out to be much simpler.

So within the site, this is just a file tree from the site after it's been cloned onto a machine. There are just a couple of directories here that are important, the content directory and then the public directory. I'm actually storing this presentation there as well, but it's obviously not needed for serving out course materials.

But our markdown files and markdown files are generated inside of content, and then when GitLab pages renders the website, it creates HTML files, which then are moved into public. And the other things in here have a purpose, but not necessary for this presentation.

And my organizational structure that I've come up with in my head is to have high-level topics, subtopics below those, and then modules, which are the actual activities or exercises that are contributed by people. So just to give an example, something like cartography would be a high-level topic, and there's currently nothing in there,

so you don't see anything but an index file. And then another high-level topic would be coordinate reference systems, and underneath here, on-the-fly transformation. And then I have a module that I call Disparic Coordinate Reference Systems. In this little module, this is something I'm planning to do this fall in my GIS 1 class, where I'll have students who don't have much, if any, experience with GIS,

take two sources that have different coordinate reference systems, put them into the same map document, and see what happens. And this is kind of where the magic happens from GitLab's perspective. This is the GitLab pages config file. This is just the default. So if you drop this inside of a GitLab repository,

it'll try to create a pages website for you, and I can go into more details about this at the end if necessary. So the live site is being hosted at this libregio.com, and I was super pumped to get my hands on that domain. And this is the landing page,

so if you go to the page, you'll see this, and then over on the left, I've got the high-level topics listed here. So if I click on attribute data, there's nothing in here yet, but if I go down and click on coordinate reference systems I can see the list of subtopics. So the subtopics are there listed on the left,

and then I've just got a list of the number of activities, tutorials, and exercises. And this is searchable, so if I wanted to say, okay, you know, which subtopic has the greatest number of activities, and then kind of take a look inside of here. And this is a list of all the modules specific to that subtopic. So I've got the title, author, the type,

and then I threw in a couple other columns like the estimated time, this is a short one, 15 or 20 minutes, and then the software. So this one will work in, I say any, but probably most desktop GIS systems that have on-the-fly transformation should work.

Okay, so this is another idea that I had that if somebody wanted to just kind of browse the list of modules and were interested in deploying their own version, they could just make a list of all of the modules that they wanted in a config file,

and then there would be some sort of bash script or something that would run a few different programs to generate a new version of LibreGeo for them. So, and we can also have, you know, different things to modify the appearance of the webpage, depending on the kind of course that you're teaching, maybe the course name or university or name of the person teaching the course.

So this is another idea that I have. And I do see some potential alternatives that maybe there's a better way to do things than what I have laid out here. It was already mentioned before, the QGIS tutorials and tips, these are things that I've used in my classes.

So instead of hosting everything on LibreGeo, what if there was a topic or subtopic where there was a list of external resources here and people who have worked through this sort of thing before could come up with the amount of time that it would take, and these links actually in the presentation point to those external resources. But that's maybe an alternative approach.

Of course, links do break from time to time, and then there's no control over the content that's in here, although most of this sort of stuff is licensed with Creative Commons. So under most Creative Commons licenses, there's nothing wrong with taking that in

and modifying it yourself, which could be an approach as well. Or maybe it's better to organize everything by activities, tutorials, and exercises, and then put the topics under those. So open to alternatives in terms of the approach. So another kind of challenge that I think about are several challenges.

I wonder if GIS educators will use Git. I know a lot of GIS educators in the US. I think I'm the only one who's version controlling course materials inside of GitLab repository. So I'm sure there are others out there, and I've kind of heard rumors of that here. So they exist, but will people in the US

or in other places do this? Will the majority do this? I'm not really sure. And also, just in preparing this presentation this summer and working on getting my course materials into this sort of thing, it's already beyond me, and I'm the only contributor right now. So project management is a big challenge here.

It might be possible to seek out funding, and then if so, I could have students handle submissions and proofreading and that sort of thing. And then as academics, attributing credit is a big deal. So how can we attribute credit to people who are submitting these modules, maybe have some sort of peer review system

where you submit one and then you review one? And then my last point here is with all of this, my goal at the very beginning was to conserve labor and create less work. If this is creating more work for people, then it's totally missing the mark. So with that, I'll close. I do have this little survey here. Whether you're in academia or industry,

I'd love to hear your thoughts. So it's at libregio.com slash survey, or you can just scan the QR code. I have an optional text box for the name if you're interested in being a contributor and working with me on this, but completely optional. So with that, I'd be happy to take questions. Thank you very much.

I kind of just have a comment. I was in grad school. I was also a teaching assistant under a professor who was an assistant professor finishing her PhD. So we just took the labs from the textbook and some worked well. Does that allow the students

to kind of follow along themselves or work at their own pace or watch me go through the lab? But I just am really impressed by this and I definitely think people will use it. I'll take the survey and let you know that. It would have been very handy. Just to add, I think there are a lot of course materials out there, but a lot of times people don't know

that they exist or where to find them. So to have a repository where different people could contribute what they have might be helpful. Thank you very much. My question is about, do you know other projects being carried out in this domain? I know that there is a project from ISPRS. They are funding some of the work

and it's in South Africa from University of Pretoria. So maybe you would like to have a look on it. They have also collected a huge amount of data and the main contributor is also visiting this workshop. So I am not sure whether it's on Friday they have a presentation about this. That was the first point.

Second point is about the attribution to your data sets. You could kind of go with some of the automated approaches to check against the plagiarism and other deciding where this work is coming from. So maybe like a preliminary data set or check that whether it's a plagiarized work

or it's an original contribution. It's very difficult to find it out. And that's just a comment about this one. The last thing is that I was working on something similar. A friend of mine is a medical doctor in Austria and he wants to learn GIS.

How should I give him the GIS material? So I was thinking about an idea that there are different type of people. My brother is electrical engineer. Another one is a GIS health engineer or from health profession. So we might come up with a solution where people are actually giving up their initial information

what is their background, what their background is. And based upon this one we could generate those contents automatically. So in your case it's probably a YML file. So if you could generate it automatically this will solve also a big problem for the community, for the others who want to learn GIS.

I think that's where it should go because there are a lot of people who want to learn it. But they don't find the real material. And also if I have learned it in my way how could I share it with the others on a social way? Thank you very much for your contribution.

Thanks for the question. Yeah, so on your last point like the website here. So this table is just hard coded as of right now but it would be pretty easy to do things like okay just make a list of the modules or things related to this certain topic or make a list of the modules underneath this subtopic

and you can generate it through a bash grip or something would be really easy. So yeah I think there's some potential there. And on your first question or your first comment about other projects going on I was not aware of others. I heard that there was one at South Carolina that was going on for a little bit that didn't really take off. And from what I've heard and this is just secondhand information

but the primary reason why it didn't take off is because people didn't want their course materials to get blasted by other instructors who would see them. And I'm thinking we can get over this. This happens to me every time I submit a paper to a journal. So we can get over it and work together, yeah. But this project from ISPR is open source project so open project you can contribute as well

exactly like this leverage here. Okay. So it's. Sorry, oh, sorry. Use the mic because of the, sorry. Any more question? We still have time. Last question. Not so much a question but could you show us some of the materials? Oh yes, I meant to actually click on this one.

I meant to click on this during the presentation but this is just one that I've come up with. I'm in the process of moving other materials over here but since this is a, we'll call it early release of LibreGeo there's not a whole lot on here yet. But this is one that I talked a little bit about before

that I'm gonna implement in class. So this little overview is just for the instructor and this is one where I'm not gonna give the students a little handout, I'm just gonna kinda tell them follow me and do as I do. And then the activity is listed there. So this requires a data set and that's something else that I haven't yet done is figure out a way

to put data sets on here. But yeah, this is an example of one. Yeah. Could I contribute as a CSS a bit, make the layout a bit readable and stuff?

Is it possible to do that because this is not attractive for students? So this is using that Hugo theme called learn and there are some really small modifications that you can make to the theme. But yeah, for the, I think the best approach

would be to make the contribution to the theme itself and then I could fork a branch from that project and use that instead if it works better for students. So you've chosen Hugo because it's integrated in R. This is very important that you can create this stuff

with R because there are other static H-T-H, A-T-M-L generators. Yeah, so there are others out there like Jekyll is one and it's really not necessary

to use blog down in R to work with Hugo. That's what I've chosen since a lot of my GIS instruction is done with R and then I have my students use R markdown and generate their activities, homework assignments and projects using R markdown as well. So it was just kind of a seamless transition for me. But if there's something else that works better

for other people, then I'm certainly willing to consider. Maybe the last one? Just a comment to the last question. Maybe you could use something multidisciplinary like Pandoc or something like that. So if I don't work with, I just work with the classical markdown.

So and you work with R markdown, we can combine the projects again. Thank you. I'll just have one comment here. With R markdown, you can actually use just plain markdown files and blog down or render it into the Hugo site for you.

Well, thank you everybody. The time is up, time for lunch. Thank you for spotting. Have a nice day.