Teaching

Courses taught:

Introduction to geographic information systems

Remote sensing of environment

Advanced topics in GIS

Special topics in remote sensing

Teaching philosophy:

As a result of my teaching introduction courses of Geographical Information System (GIS) and graduate level seminar of GIS and remote sensing, I have found that engaging student in the classroom is one of the most effective ways to teach students with requirement of operational skills on computers. For the students, learning GIS is an experience with excitement, but at the same time, it could be frustrating because of the demand for significant amount of effort and time devoted to the learning. Therefore, I developed strategies to engage students in the classroom. First, I constantly promote opportunities for students’ questions, insights, and dissent based on the content taught. The students will actively search for answers from the textbook, powerpoint slides, and the internet. The second strategy is to use the computers in the classroom for hand-on training. In the classroom, I describe the purpose of the operations first, and then ask students to follow my instruction step by step. At the end of each class, the students will be able to see their progress in learning. The intensive in-class training directed by the instructor has been proved to be very effective and well received by the students.

As a geographer, I always regard my responsibility of teaching more than just telling student what is GIS and remote sensing. My ultimate goal is to promote students’ ability of spatial thinking, especially for Geography students. Spatial thinking is a unique gift from Geography, and GIS has been a great boost for it. I always encourage students, regardless their major or research direction, to take the GIS course as one of the way approach to spatial thinking. It is an opportunity to gain knowledge, skill, and even to change their philosophy about the world.

The quality of teaching is also related to my research activities. A significant amount of my teaching materials is from my research work. I showed the students how a research project can be done using the knowledge we learned from the classroom or how to translate knowledge taught in the classroom into a research project. This strategy is mainly used to engage graduate students so that they are able to get involved in both their learning and research projects. I require the graduate students in my class to complete a science project by the end of the semester and a 10-page paper and an oral presentation. For graduate students, the main pedagogical goal of the class project is for students to have opportunities to read articles, write their reports, and make progress to their research.

I am committed to actively mentoring graduate and undergraduate students. I like to talk with the students about their research progress or the questions regarding Geospatial techniques. I am always happy to help them solve problems or provide insights to their research topics.