Experience with esri Virtual Campus

Introduction

For this lab, we used a course offered on esri virtual campus.  There were several differences between the lab that we did as a course through esri, and our last lab which was not.  Overall I had a very positive experience using esri virtual campus and thought that it worked well for teaching both information and practical skills on geodatabases. 

Advantages to esri

There were several advantages to using esri virtual campus, mainly the fact that it was very intuitive and user friendly.  The layout was straightforward and made it easy to go through.



Screenshot of the basic layout for the course

            Also, during the exercises there were several places where you check to see what it was supposed to look like, so you could know if you had followed the directions right.



An example of a window that appears that shows what the result should look like



 

Finally, esri also had videos that could demonstrate how to do things while having someone narrate it.  The MAG book also has a DVD with it, which can be used when stuck on a problem.  I generally just tend not to use it because I forget about it as a resource.   Overall I found that esri was good way to learn about managing geodatabases.

Disadvantages to esri

I had very few problems when working with esri, aside from the fact that sometimes my screen would look slightly different then what it looked like when I clicked the "view result" links.  Others I found everything offered on esri very useful.

Comparisons and Conclusions

Personally I found the esri lab easier and more understandable than the other labs that we have done so far.  In terms of comparing it to the MAG labs, there were a lot of similarities in that I felt both gave good instructions during the exercises, and also could refer to places with more information (different places in the MAG book or links to information on esri) but esri was better in respect to actually showing you what the screen should look like.  It also had the advantage of being able to show a video which was also very helpful and just not possible with the MAG labs. I would recommend using esri in the future and keeping it as part of the Intro to GIS course.

Sources:

All screenshots from esri.com