|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | [gislist] SUM: GIS training |
| Date: |
02/14/2007 01:10:00 PM |
| From: |
Trish Long |
|
|
Hi - Thanks to all who responded to my four questions about GIS training. I
received 8 responses. It has been difficult to find the time to sum. Some
good tidbits were from Michael DiGaetano, "Make the GIS experience fun for
the users," and from Julie Ewald, "Half the training is getting to grips
with the data." Bill Alfred wrote, "Training will always be an on-going
issue... because of staff turnover and upgrades to the product. Most staff
need a little handholding after training to apply what they learned. My
reasoning for this is that GIS is composed of multiple disciplines when you
get to the analysis phase..."
I included more of the most relevant responses below. My original post is at
the end of this message.
Trish
>From Julie Ewald:
1) Separate department
2) in house, by GIS staff
3) results of inhouse training, fairly well if individual who is being
trained wants to learn. We are a scientific research institute though so we
do tend to have staff who are by nature inquisitive and eager to learn new
things.
4) Our remit - ecological research - means that often 'off the peg' courses
or training does not fit well with the task in hand. Also many of the
datasets we use are unique to ourselves etc. and this is half the training,
getting to grips with the data
>From Michael DiGaetano, City of Richmond, Dept. of Public Utilities,
Technical Services Division:
1. For Richmond, the hardware, network and program installation and
maintenance aspects of our GIS is handled by the IT department. The City's
GIS coordinator and GIS core team are members of the Dept. of Public Works,
mostly for administrative purposes. The users are located at their various
offices all over the city.
2. The users, spread out all over the city, are trained by various
methods,
including in-house tutorial classes and user group meetings hosted by the
City's GIS core team and some ESRI instructor led classes. My own training
has included the above mentioned methods, a handful of additional ESRI
instructor led classes, hundreds of hours studying at the ESRI Virtual
Campus, many hours searching for information on the internet, and reading
many downloaded and hardbound books. The answer to this question would be
that I used both methods, with the exception that our IT department does not
train people.
3. Our in-house training has gone very well. This is because of the
vast
experience and expertise of our GIS Coordinator and his core term which they
share at user group meetings and occasional in-house training sessions. My
job requires me to perform a wide variety of GIS tasks. If I ever have a
problem that I cannot solve, I just call a member of the core team to obtain
the answer. I use this method as a last resort: however, because those guys
have their own work to do. The answer about production is yes, but my
training was from a variety of sources.
4. There are several key factors about getting the GIS work done. Below
is a partial listing:
*********************************************************
Create and maintain the metadata. This is very important, especially when
needing to know about something created years ago.
Keep a list of GIS users in your organization, their phone numbers, their
responsibilities to your GIS, and their interests in GIS. This is to help
you contact the most appropriate person for answers and possibly to set up
user group meetings.
Encourage use of the ESRI Virtual Campus, now known as ESRI Training and
Education.
Encourage your users to practice with the software and to read the help
files. This helps them to learn the capabilities of the software.
Encourage your users to learn ArcObjects and Python. Learning ArcObjects
will help them to understand how the software works.
Encourage your users to create or to have created custom programs with full
documentation. The users know best what they need. Others may know best how
they could achieve it, but the process has to be documented.
>From Bill Alfred:
1) The Florida Department of Health sort of does not have a place for GIS to
live as you describe. GIS Professionals in the Department are currently in
the process of trying to convince Department managers of the necessity for
creating such a "GIS Department". Within the Department GIS serves about 11
divisions and 67 County Health Departments. I would characterize our
Department as an "ESRI shop". The Department has a license manager which
allows 40 users to use software such as ArcView concurrently. If you had to
specify a place where GIS lives, it would be in the division I am employed,
Planning Evaluation and Data Analysis, as the Sponsoring GIS division. This
division is also a user of GIS, so this may not be a good fit when looking
at Departmental GIS issues. The Department also has a GIS Coordinating
Committee (GCC) composed of those divisions who use or have an interest in
GIS. All m
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
