Hi Roy
Long time no e-mail/speak etc.
Your external is well out-of-order! Has he/she 15 years applied GIS experience?
You should be fairly strong in the response to the external, but of course as squeeky as I'd be.
I would make the following points:
Point out the innovative nature of the teaching in exposing them to open source research tools (point out R as another fantastic example) that are freely downloadable to their computers.
ArcGIS is only widely available in UK academic institutions, not the wider UK GIS-user community. This is due to CHEST deals etc. If the masters students are going on to a UK academic institution then knowledge of ArcGIS might be useful, however there is nothing to stop them installing GRASS (now in a Windows environment) - the two systems are now comparably powerful.
For home or EU students who have access to jobs in the offices of English Nature, Environment Agency etc only core GIS staff (they've probably not got ecology backgrounds) have access to expensive ArcGIS, it's much more likely that they end up faffing away with MapInfo etc. Being able to install a powerful GIS like GRASS on their office desks should be a distinct feather in your students' caps as far as employability is concerned.
The situation is even more extreme for your overseas students, particularly from developing countries, being independent of expensive software such as ArcGIS is a major plus for them. You should be able to polish this point up for your external quite convincingly.
Others have made the comparisons with other software: a good example for you to use in your response is stats software. Should students be limited to using SPSS because is sells more than R ? Undoubtely, the external is more likley to recognise this formulation of your argument.
Finally, throw in a bit of compromise and give them an Arc practical just to keep the external happy, but more importantly show the students how much more logical and user/research-friendly GRASS is.
If you need quotes from a coordinator of a competing masters programme - just get in touch. I will hopefully be following your example and using GRASS in teaching sooner rather than later.
Cheers for now
Colin
Hello
Last spring I converted a short course I give to some of our MSc students,
from ArcGIS 9 to GRASS 6.0. Whilst the students had had no prior exposure
to GIS (or indeed Linux), it was obvious that they progressed through their
work much more rapidly and learnt more in terms of the fundamental
concepts, and I was pleased with the overall results.However, the External Examiner's report for the MSc has criticised the
change to GRASS, stating that "it isn't known outside Newcastle" and that
it is harming the students' employment prospects on graduation. The
examiner is clearly wanting me to go back to using something like ArcGIS or
MapInfo in the GIS module.It would be useful if anyone could provide me with a few facts/figures on
the use of GRASS outside of academia, especially in any large commercial
companies etc.Many thanks
Roy
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Roy Sanderson
Institute for Research on Environment and Sustainability
Devonshire Building
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
United KingdomTel: +44 191 246 4835
Fax: +44 191 246 4999http://www.ncl.ac.uk/environment/
r.a.sanderson at newcastle.ac.uk <http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grassuser>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Dr Colin McClean
Environment Department
University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
Tel: +44-(0)1904-432995
Fax: +44-(0)1904-432998
http://www.york.ac.uk/environment/
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