Improvement of GIS exercise materials for university students based on questionnaire surveys

We have been developing e-learning materials called "GIS-Open Educational Resources" for university students in Japan. The materials explain methods of processing geospatial data using free GIS software packages such as QGIS. The materials were used in classes of GIS exercises in universities. We conducted questionnaire surveys during the classes to judge whether the students can learn GIS effectively using the materials. The results show that most students who attended the classes were highly satisfied and well understood basic operations of GIS, but also felt some difficulties. The results also suggest that some students could not get high learning effects due to the lack of motivation and basic skills of PC operation. We also conducted another type of questionnaire surveys to collect the opinions of online users of the e-learning materials. We found a large variation in learning difficulty among the users, and some had problems even with the most basic learning topics such as displaying spatial data and map construction. Considering these results, we developed new e-learning materials to support beginners. The new materials were intended to learn basic skills such as spatial thinking and PC operation, corresponding to the secondary education level. For example, students can understand how to read topographic maps and identify typical terrain types by operating a simple WebGIS, which was constructed using open source libraries such as CesiumJS and Leaflet. In this presentation, we introduce the details of the questionnaire surveys and the newly developed materials.