Hi All,
In the first few months of my position as GIS Technician here in the SAL I have had multiple conversations with students, faculty, and staff who would like to learn to use GIS, but do not have the time to take a full course. One of the wonderful things about ArcGIS (and there are many!) is that ESRI provides great support for learning to use the various tools and products. I often find the online help to be useful when performing a new analysis or trying to get a tricky map to look good. However, there are also countless other resources available for learning GIS from the beginning. Here’s a list of a few of the resources I’ve been directing people to.
Here is a free course from ESRI (the company that makes the ArcGIS software) for getting started. It’s about 4 hours long broken into different modules.
http://training.esri.com/gateway/index.cfm?fa=catalog.webCourseDetail&courseid=2500
These videos by Harvard University might be useful as well for getting started.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/maps/gis/tutorials.cfm
And here is a workbook resource from University of Maryland for learning GIS with a little more depth.
Lastly, Kim and I have signed up for a new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered by ESRI called “Going Places with Spatial Analysis”. Here’s a screenshot of the website to give you an idea what the course is about. We are planning on hosting SAL lunches every Wednesday at noon to discuss the past week’s lesson and create space for all those learning GIS to network and get to know each other. If you would like to join us show up on Wednesday September 9th or email me ahead of time to let me know you’re interested. Here is the link to the sign up!
As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact me or drop by the SAL in INTC 300!
Best,
Taylor Holden
GIS Technician
taylor.holden@richmond.edu