Towards establishing an open catalogue for geospatial educational resources

Abstract

Existing geospatial educational resources are not always easy to find and to integrate into an academic module, amongst others, because the required metadata is not available. As a consequence, simple search attempts do not bring us to these resources, and we miss out on some material that may be very useful in teaching and learning. Our aim is to develop a searchable catalogue of existing geospatial educational resources that can be used by communities, such as ISPRS or GeoForAll, universities and other educational institutions. The catalogue will index new and existing geospatial educational resources (e.g. electronic textbooks, tutorials, and quizzes) so that the resources can be searched and discovered. Based on the metadata, educators can select appropriate educational resources for integration into an educational event, such as an online course or a module at university level. We believe such an open catalogue of searchable geospatial educational resources is valuable for educators worldwide and will provide students with the opportunity to learn using local and international examples to widen their knowledge. In addition, this future catalogue should broaden overall access to geospatial education and empower communities for the benefit of society. In this paper, we discuss requirements of preparing such a catalogue and some preliminary efforts we have made towards implementing one, including review of 114 existing systems and resources.