Using QGIS in an Advanced GIS course:

Instructor and Student Perspectives

Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger, Ph.D.

Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA

Clark University

•Small research University located in Worcester, Massachusetts•Offers Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Geography•GIS courses are taken by students from different departments (Geography, International Development, Economics, Biology, Business, Environmental Science, Community Development)

GIS Curriculum

• Five core GIS faculty• Core courses - Intro GIS; Advanced vector GIS; Advanced raster

GS; Intro to remote sensing; Advanced remote sensing; Web mapping; Computer programming for GIS• Applications courses – Conservation GIS; Environmental

applications of GIS; Social applications of GIS; GIS and Land change science; GIS for international development• Software used – ESRI products; Idrisi (TerrSet); ERDAS Imagine;

QGIS; GeoDa; CrimeStat; Fragstat

Course details

•Title: GIS for International Development •Prerequisite: Intro to GIS•Duration: seven weeks •Each week: two 75-min lectures + 75-min lab session •Enrollment: 16 to 20 graduate students (Master’s level)

Weekly themes

‒disaster management ‒global health‒water and sanitation‒poverty and hunger alleviation ‒climate change impacts‒armed conflicts, human migration, and human rights violations

Sustainable development goals

Course elements

•Hands-on short exercises during lectures•Weekly lab assignments •Final project•Weekly readings (research papers, professional reports) and class discussions

Lab 1. Generating spatial data during emergencies: Flooding in West Africa

• The goal: Calculate spatial extent of flood• Software: QGIS• Tools: Digitizing flood polygons using

MODIS data; area calculation in the attribute table• Adapted from “GIS Tutorial for

Humanitarian Assistance” book by Firoz Verjee, 2011, ESRI Press

Lab 2. Transportation network analysis for humanitarian assistance in Ethiopia

• The goal: locate warehouses, plan delivery routes, and simulate the effect of route closures in a humanitarian emergency in Ethiopia.• Software: ArcGIS (Network Analyst)• Adapted from “GIS Tutorial for

Humanitarian Assistance” book by Firoz Verjee, 2011, ESRI Press

Warehouses and food distribution points

Lab 3. Assessing damage from floods in Malawi

• Goal: to estimate the number of people and the types of land cover affected by floods• Data :

‒population (100m x 100m) from Worldpop.org, ‒land cover data from European Space Agency (300m x 300m)‒flood extent data (polygons) from the Humanitarian Data

Exchange website• Software: QGIS• Tool: Zonal statistics

Lab 4. Improving the design and operation of refugee camps: Za’atari camp in Jordan

• The goal: Estimate crowding (Calculate square meters per person)

Does it meet UNHCR guidelines for quality of service?• Software: QGIS

• Improving access to schools

Which areas are located farthest from a school? Where new schools should be built?

Lab 5. Planning for internally displaced persons camps in Uganda

• Goal: find areas most suitable for IDP camps using multiple criteria• Software: QGIS• Adapted from “GIS Tutorial

for Humanitarian Assistance” book by Firoz Verjee, 2011, ESRI Press

Questionnaire at the end of the course•What do you like about QGIS software?• If you needed to learn how to do a certain operation

in QGIS, were you able to find an answer on internet? If yes, give some useful examples (insert URL for online tutorial or a video). •Were there any analytical tools you were not able to

find in QGIS?

What students liked about QGIS…

• Open source and free• Offers broad range of tools and plugins• Can handle both raster AND vector functions• Intuitive user interface• The tools are divided as “Vector” and “Raster” in simple menus• You can keep open multiple attribute tables and tool function widows while

still working in the main window• Map making is more intuitive than ArcGIS and results are clean• Great user support community and a lot of online documentation, including in

multiple languages (http://www.qgistutorials.com/ru/index.html )

What students liked… (Continued)

• On-the-fly projection is nice and quick• The ease of projecting data as a simple part of saving a file

• QGIS is less painful to deal with when doing raster GIS, unlike ArcGIS

• Nice selection of base maps

• Ease of importing different data types

• Can easily create a shapefile from x y coordinates in a table

• Fairly crash-resistant• Plugins have rating system for users to decide before putting them into use

What students did not like…

•Many inconsistencies between versions; With every version having a new set of bugs in a new set of tools, it makes it harder to develop work-arounds in processing flows• The tools don’t have brief explanations; the help button in

every window is just a query that doesn’t work in the interface itself• Some issues, particularly with projections and going

between raster and vector datasets were not well documented on the internet

What students did not like… (continued)•No Search tab to search for a tool •No Results Tab•No Network analysis tools (location allocation, OD cost

matrix, service areas and closest facility)• It took me longer to put together a query than it should

have. I could definitely just type it faster than opening and expanding all those folders to get to the field names, values, expressions and so on

Conclusions

•Overall – very positive feedback from students• Found some glitches but usually were able to find a

work around•Rewriting exiting labs for QGIS was time-consuming •Will try to use more QGIS more in my other GIS courses

Question to the audience•Were your experiences teaching with QGIS similar?