Geoportti, the Hub for Finnish Geospatial Research and Education Resources, offers video material useful for education and public dissemination in the geospatial field and include topics such as the roles of different geospatial experts, geospatial data in the everyday lives of people, the education of geospatial topics and future visions for geospatial applications. In each of the ten videos, produced by the University of Turku, professionals from different sectors discuss, in Finnish, about the use of geospatial skills, data and resources in their daily work.
At the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Turku, the videos were used as an additional education material on two bachelor level courses on geoinformatics and geospatial methods during the 2018 – 2019 academic year.
”The videos were incorporated into the courses to concretize the societal aspects of geospatial research and to reflect various kinds of employment possibilities the geospatial skills enable.” says Juuso Suomi, the responsible teacher of the courses.
The students saw the videos as a good addition to the course materials and as a refreshing alternative to the more technical and theoretical tasks and reading materials that are commonly used in geospatial education. A common comment form students emphasised that seeing real-life examples and professionals from multiple different professions was especially interesting.
“We would like to encourage others to use the video resources when planning their geospatial education” says Vesa Arki from University of Turku who was involved in the development of the videos. “For us it was very easy to identify sections in our existing education materials where the videos could be beneficial. I also hope that seeing different experts applying geospatial skills in their working life motivates the students to study more. Based on our experiences we would recommend the use of the videos in introductory courses as a motivational tool and as starting points for a group discussion on the topic” Vesa Arki and Juuso Suomi conclude.
The videos were produced by the Department of Geography and Geology of the University of Turku as a part of the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (oGIIR).
News of the UTU Geospatial Labs hosted by the Department of Geography and Geology of the University of Turku.