A Moodle based complex system to teaching spatial data processing
Open-source solutions in geoinformatics have gradually come into the focus of attention over the past decades, becoming of the most well-promising opportunities in tertiary education. It is indubitable that students have to develop their skills to find, apply and contribute to the existing open-source opportunities, besides developing skills regarding coding and programming logic.
At the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, a complex system has been developed to support students on this matter. This system is fully based on open-source software and free cloud services. Consequently, all the teaching materials have creative common licenses supported by the use of open source software.
The main entry point of the educational materials is Moodle, considered as one of the most popular learning management systems. The majority of the source codes and explanation texts/notes used for teaching are published in Jupyter notebooks, stored on personalized GitHub pages. For opening and testing the Jupyter notebooks, the students can use Google Colab.
Another challenge worth mentioning is the continuous assessment evaluation format. Moodle supports the creation of tests based upon a wide variety of question types (e.g. multiple choice, true/false, drag and drop markers, etc), which are stored in a question bank. The test is generated by randomly selecting a given number of questions; therefore, taking the test a couple of times is highly recommended. As stated by many, this way of self-studying is popular among students these days and efficient in achieving remarkable progress.
Our presentation shares either the developed system or the gained experience over the recent years.
