THE POTENTIAL OF eLEARNING IN THE SPATIAL INFORMATION SCIENCES 
A RESOURCE FOR CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
: K. Mooney, A. Martin 
Department of Geomatics, The Dublin Institute of Technology, Bolton Street, Dublin 1. Ireland 
kevin.mooney@dit.ie, audrey.martin@dit.ie 
KEY WORDS: Internet/Web, Education, Learning, Teaching, Web based, On-line 
ABSTRACT: 
National mapping agencies have at their disposal a number of resources for the continuing professional development of their staff. 
These range from attendance at full-time University programmes to short in-house tutorials and workshops. 
The Dublin Institute of Technology has recently developed an eLearning course in ‘Co-ordinate reference systems for spatial 
information' and piloted it with staff of Ordnance Survey Ireland and the Department of Lands and Surveys, Nicosia, Cyprus. 
This paper evaluates the performance of eLearning in the delivery of the pilot courses pointing to its weaknesses and its strengths. 
The need for considered and careful use of interactive tools such as discussion boards and chat rooms is emphasised as are issues 
affecting assessment and accreditation. The authors provide an analysis of the time commitment required in the preparation and 
delivery of eLearning courses in the spatial information sciences and make recommendations as to the choice of appropriate course 
topics. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The Department of Geomatics at the Dublin Institute of 
Technology (DIT) has developed a distance eLearning course in 
‘Co-ordinate Reference Systems for Spatial Information’ as part 
of its suite of learning resources for the continuing professional 
development (CPD) of staff of geographical information (GI) 
organisations. 
The course comprises six themes: 
Theme | Describing position with co-ordinates 
Theme 2 Defining and realising co-ordinate reference systems 
Theme 3 Calculation in a two-dimensional Cartesian co- 
ordinate reference system 
Theme 4 From local to global co-ordinate reference systems 
Theme 5 Manipulating co-ordinates 
Theme 6 Position in Ireland (Customisable) 
Theme 6 is customisable to specific reference systems 
pertaining to a particular country or group of participants. 
In order to evaluate the suitability of eLearning as a CPD 
resource the course was piloted with two groups of participants 
from the Irish national mapping agency (NMA), Ordnance 
Survey Ireland (OS;). The experience gained from these two 
pilots (Martin et. al., 2003) was used to modify the course prior 
to a final pilot with staff of the Department of Lands and 
Surveys, Nicosia, Cyprus at the beginning of 2004. 
2. COURSE CONTENT 
Participants had the option of following the course either on- or 
off-line as all content was reproduced in a CD-ROM and printed 
as hardcopy, both of which were provided to participants at a 
one-day pre-course workshop. All participants were brought 
together with the course tutors at this workshop for the purpose 
of: 
= meeting other participants and tutors 
160 
= receiving off-line content material 
" receiving the course guide and handbook 
= obtaining login and password codes 
"  familiarisation with the on-line course environment (in the 
case of DIT eLearning courses — WebCT). 
Course content was created using Macromedia“ 
Dreamweaver" v2.0 for the html content off-line. Multiple html 
files were then compressed using standard zip tools and 
uploaded to WebCT" using its ‘File Management’ interface, 
which also included an ‘unzip’ function to extract the html files, 
once uploaded. 
In total 82 html files were used, the majority of which included 
an animated graphic, which consisted of a series of sequenced 
frames (GIF images), which could be navigated via an 
animation control applet developed in Javascript". The 
animation control allowed the learner to view the animation at 
his/her own pace and as often as required. The GIF images 
(930 in total) were generated using a combination of Adobe“ 
Illustrator" v9.0, and Macromedia" Fireworks" v2.0. 
The frames of the animation were, however, in two dimensions. 
Feedback from the pilot participants, pointed to the need for 
comprehensive three-dimensional animations as opposed to a 
series of two-dimensional frames. Co-ordinate reference 
systems are essentially three-dimensional concepts, particularly 
in the case of global datums. In order to attain a thorough 
understanding of their principles participants felt that they 
would benefit from a facility to manipulate a three-dimensional 
model dynamically. 
The textual content was interlaced with hyperlinks to a glossary 
of technical terms and definitions. This feature was welcomed 
by participants but some felt that the explanations were not 
sufficiently fundamental and that a knowledge of even the most 
elementary concept should not be presumed. 
It is the experience of the authors, therefore, that content 
relating to complex definitions of principles should be 
fundamental and elementary in nature. Through the imaginative