ESRI Do-It-Yourself Geo Apps mooc

What's a Mooc?

Massive open online courses are courses by esri free and open to anyone. Just go to their website and sign up. You are provided with software access, resources, data, a forum for discussion  and a teacher to guide you through the exercises.

Strengths of the course

hands on application building - this was probably my favorite part of the course. When you enroll in a MOOC you are able to use the tools and features of the online platform that normally you'd have to pay for.

the team learning environment - if you are like me, self study sucks sometimes. I need the knowledge, but it's so much more rewarding to learn as part of a group with a goal. Seeing the message boards active with new ideas and creative solutions really got me excited for the future of the industry.

real world applications - it was emphasized in this course how much these applications could be used in the real world. If you've spent any time in the gis industry you know how old and tired the "custom location of x with data on y with a callout" examples get.

I very much enjoyed the ability to try some of the filtering and statistical analysis features. This is where I see the biggest potential, building apps online that help users draw conclusions and get information that's more than the sum of the parts. I don't think anyone really wants an app to tell them the rating of a local school or the nearest grocery store, but if these data points (along with others from search history, Facebook Data, ect) can be combined into an algorithm to show prime locations for a new home search, that's the magic of GIS

Weaknesses of the course:

Personally I found the course shallow. I'm aware this was presented as an intro course, but I really didn't like how little time we spent in each section. Perhaps this wasn't the point of the course but I saw so many times when I wish the course could have stopped and explored different paths. The first being the open data portal.

https://opendata.dc.gov - we worked with the DC one but the amount of free and open data on this site was staggering. I would have loved if we were able to spend more time on just working with data for the backside of a geoapp.

lack of data analysis within the applications. One of the great parts about GIS and building applications is the ability to analyze data in real time or to allow your users to see data analytics in real time. Because this course was limited, there were few opportunities to see what tools were available for data. The closest we got was just a normalization within the esri dataset.

no api?! - this was the worst if not the biggest problem with the corse. No outside linking to anything. Now I realize that this is where you might say, but this is an esri course, why would they help their competitors, but why then do applications have apis? Why does google have one? or trello? or instagram? Because they want their applications running in the back of other applications. Overall a lack of forsight in this area is going to be trouble for esri in the future.

Opportunities of the course:

More MOOCS with more detailed classes. I'm somewhat new to the mooc world and just a glance at the catalog you can see there's many more classes offered. I'll definitely be taking more in the future.

In regards to geoapps, with a foundation like this course, and the extra exercises, I see the use of geoapps being opened to a wider community. While I might complain about the depth or the type of course, it made me so excited to see the different ideas coming from many different fields in the group discussions. More people, beyond GIS nerds need to get into GIS.

The chance to get your hands on ESRI software hopefully will open up esri more to a freeware use. While I see them becoming Adobe (in many ways they have) my hope is to have a wider implementation ESIR will make more services open to the public. If even at best, being capitalists and wanting more people in their ecosystem it will get people thinking spatially.

Threats to the course

If you are a professional, the knowledge becoming outdated, but you have the opportunity to learn more! You must keep learning, studying and reading to remain at the top of your game. If you let it slip, you risk becoming a dinosaur. At one time this was enough, but today, especially if you are recently graduated, the specialization approach is going to be hard to execute.

The tech industry is moving faster than the gis industry. Take a look at the applications on your phone running maps or even using spatial data. How many are using esri stuff? Few and far between. In my experience, the biggest consumers of esir products are counties and city governments, they pay the most, are the least willing to change (see dinosaurs) and are the most likely to buy more parts of the ecosystem once sold.

The apps look ugly. Im sorry, this is probably my least favorite part of this course. the maps at the end look like crap. When compared to other products like mapbox esri maps look so boring and honestly don't make me want to use their services in an app at all.

Conclusion: Be curious

Learning is great, and if you are like me, learning never gets old. If you find a MOOC that interests you, I'd encourage you to learn and dig into the self study portions of the course. This is where you are going to learn the most. BUT step outside too, the biggest problem i see with GIS professionals today is they are tool oriented. They wanna be an ersi expert instead of being curios about the world around them. Get outside, read some new books, read some old books, get inspired, ask questions, take a MOOC and bring some new ideas with you.