Esri in One Hour: GIS in Education, with Esther Worker

For my Esri in One Hour chat today, I met with Esther Worker. Esri is currently an Education Account Manager for the Mid-West and Western US, and manages over 2,000 accounts (wow!). In our chat, we talked about different disciplines using GIS, ArcGIS use in education, and new goals and directions for increasing GIS use in education and beyond.

In 2014, Jack Dangermond donated ArcGIS Online to public, private, and home schools through President Barack Obama’s ConnectED initiative. ConnectED, launched in 2013, importantly encouraged private technology companies to make in-kind contributions through the initiative to increase the use of current technical teaching and learning solutions in schools and support technical readiness throughout levels of education.

Esri education teams, in partnership with educational consultants and working with educational standards, developed GeoInquiries, which are concise classroom activities that guide learners through the basic geographic inquiry process. These are ready-out-of-the-box lessons, and collections have been developed for US history, environmental science, earth science, and more, and are even designed, often, to fit with AP curricula. I want to take some of these! They seem like great little introductions to GIS and ArcGIS.

GeoInquiries and ConnectED donations mainly reach K-12 audiences, in an attempt to encourage familiarity with ArcGIS and geographic inquiry, broadly, in youth and young students, through high school education. Esther also works with many higher education accounts, however. Higher education initiatives are focuses on bringing ArcGIS and geographic literacy into community colleges and universities. Most universities hold ArcGIS site licenses, similar to much software offered to university students. This site license for ArcGIS results in unlimited education use of Esri products as well as limited administrative use.

I was curious and surprised to learn about this aspect of administrative use. I had seen a small article on an Esri page about campus security web applications being developed in ArcGIS Online, using common crime mapping practices, but had not thought much of schools using ArcGIS for campus administration until Esther brought this up. Providing limited administration ArcGIS use to schools is a great way to embed ArcGIS in the day-to-day function of campuses. Esther pointed out that campuses often behave like small cities, and, often, administrators employ similar ArcGIS workflows as cities and local governments, on a smaller scale. As an account manager, one of her jobs is to check for redundancy in campus implementation of ArcGIS solutions, to make sure they aren’t requiring a customization or configuration that is already being used successfully in a local government use case, and vice versa.

The last component of ArcGIS support in education is youth outreach and lifelong learning. Esri supports youth groups with ArcGIS software, including Girl and Boy Scouts and other groups. Additionally, Esri develops MOOCs for learning ArcGIS, and supports career development of GIS professionals through professional networks.

For all of these accounts, which measure in at over 5,000, there are only two education account managers! Esther is one of theme, and I am impressed with the volume of accounts she manages.

I asked more questions about current goals for ArcGIS use in university settings, as Josh and Esther had both briefly brought that up. Esther filled me in on current goals in higher education. Traditionally, geospatial software has lived in the geosciences. Now (with focus on ArcGIS JavaScript API, web development, and ArcGIS Online), we are understanding the need for developers to understand and use ArcGIS. The current goal is to expand ArcGIS use into Computer Science, IT groups and other departments focused on development and coding languages. The goal is to add ArcGIS to the technical toolkit students in these disciplines are exposed to.

A good line Esther said during our conversation about increasing GIS in education is that it is so hard to “sell free”. Most of the work in increasing ArcGIS use in education, across disciplines, is in explaining the value of geospatial analysis to different use cases, including campus safety, research, and student projects. She pointed out that science classes love ArcGIS because of the potential to create many different visualizations from “messy data” through the process of geospatial inquiry. Because of the size of the education team (only 15 people!) compared to the massive number of education accounts (over 5,000), Esther and Esri rely on GIS champions in schools to share use cases for ArcGIS with other faculty. Additionally, Esri supports ArcGIS adoption through inviting passionate young users to the Users Conference, helping with GIS Day events, and giving presentations to faculty. She shared about a high school student who presented their work with AR and VR at the Users Conference, and also shared that the Denver office will host research faculty in Colorado for a presentation later in June. Like much ArcGIS adoption, sharing relevant and interesting examples of ArcGIS use seems to be the best way to get more users thinking about how geospatial visualization can enhance their projects. She shared an example of how a school district is using ArcGIS to organize school bus transportation, in a route-planning way similar to UPS route planning. This school district also seeks to incorporate sensors to include real-time student identification and location services on their campus (which kind of freaks me out, but probably is good for organization…). Esther pointed out that sensor integration is a new area of growth into using ArcGIS, which I think technical disciplines varying from atmospheric sciences to engineering would be very drawn to.

I asked about common student projects, if she could characterize them. Esther shared that as of now, data science is the new desired area for greater ArcGIS use. She said many school projects focus on helping rural governments get started with GIS, and students can provide valuable software implementation and exposure to ArcGIS for local governments. Currently, many students are looking at social impacts and heritage in the face of new development, as well. Transportation, especially multi-modal transportation, is another common area for ArcGIS study. In the west, she pointed out that many students are focused on environmental problems/solutions. A previous student project shared at UC had focused on GIS and peacekeeping, which sounded interesting, and GIS use for business analytics is a new area of growth for ArcGIS use in schools.

CU Boulder Geography has a monthlycolloquium series, often with a GIS topic. Esri’s own Joseph Kerski was a recent speaker. Esther also shared the names of Colorado GIS user groups, including GIS Colorado. These user groups put on a fall conference: GIS in the Rockies. I’ll have to look into this come fall!

Esther shared so much information with me, which makes sense from her incredible number of education accounts. Of course, as a university student, I’m passionate about these student projects, and will definitely be thinking about how more technical departments can embrace this software, especially as real-time analytics become a feature.