Esri Selects Winners of ArcGIS Online Grant Program for Educators

Grantees Will Develop Projects to Support Teaching and Research

February 28, 2012

Redlands, California—Esri has awarded five grants to select university and college faculty members to create exemplary higher education course materials and implementations of ArcGIS Online. Grantees receive $10,000 (US) each, as well as assistance from curriculum development specialists on Esri's education solutions team.

ArcGIS Online is a cloud-based geospatial platform that enables individuals to create and share maps, apps, and map services. Later this year, Esri will introduce new features to ArcGIS Online, providing enhanced mapping and data sharing capabilities to support collaboration within an organization. Esri will include ArcGIS Online subscriptions in its educational site licenses at no extra cost.

"Our goal is to help early adopters demonstrate the potential of the ArcGIS Online platform to support spatial thinking and learning across the curriculum," says David DiBiase, director of Esri's education solutions team. "We believe this new platform will enable hundreds of thousands more students worldwide to experience the power of GIS."

The grant winners and their projects are as follows:

• Mark Lindberg, Len Kne, and their colleagues at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN) will evaluate how the software can be used to support teaching, research, and enterprise services across a large land grant university.
• Dr. Fred L. Miller and colleagues at Murray State University (Murray, KY) will develop and deploy business GIS exercises for marketing majors.
• Dr. Christopher Bone at the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR) will use the software as a platform for a new introductory course, entitled Our Digital Earth, to expose students to the geospatial data and technologies found in their daily lives.
• Ken Yanow at Southwestern College (Chula Vista, CA) will create a series of assignments for a suite of general education courses that will enroll a diverse population of 2,000 students per year.
• Dr. Eui-kyung Shin at Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL) will develop geographic curriculum materials that enhance spatial thinking and active learning for elementary preservice teachers.

Grantees will present their preliminary results during the 2012 Esri Education GIS Conference in San Diego, California, and implement them on campus during the 2012–13 academic year.

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