Credit: Chris Montgomery (Unsplash)

These days you can learn about almost any topic by watching videos online. But the benefits of having a trainer present to guide and correct you, troubleshoot issues, and maximise your learning makes face-to-face training invaluable. So how does this translate when the people you’re teaching are thousands of kilometres away, watching you on a video call?

Whilst face-to-face trainers are irreplaceable in terms of effectiveness, particularly for novice classes, there are many benefits to remote training such as:

• Greater flexibility for timing and duration.
• Reduced costs (especially if inter-regional travel is involved); and
• A much greater geographic reach.

Recently a client rang asking if I could teach their team a couple of new skills in QGIS in a hurry so they could get a report over the line. We had to put together some training material in a short time frame and attempt to deliver it as an effective learning session. And from all accounts, the training was a success!

Here’s how we made it work:

1. Small class size
2. Use appropriate teaching mediums
3. Teach the concepts, not just the content
4. Give attendees prior knowledge of the topic
5. Limit your audience appropriately
6. Preparation!

1. Small class size

This one is a no-brainer. In a small group, the trainer can provide more one-on-one time, people are less likely to fall behind if they get lost at any stage, and you won’t need to stop as frequently to help people out as you would in a large class. Manageable class sizes are especially important when running remote training, since watching demos on a computer monitor can be trickier for students than being present in a room.

2. Use appropriate teaching mediums

The majority of people learn best via visual formats and hands-on exercises. As a trainer you’re already challenged with keeping attendees engaged and focused (doubly so for remote training), so look for opportunities to use visual learning tools.

It’s no cliché that a picture tells a thousand words! Most people zone out when they see a wall of text (like this blog post).

Something as simple as a stick figure diagram in a slide show with some animated components can get through to your audience and give them that “Aha!” moment that is so gratifying as a trainer.

Here’s an image we’ve used in our QGIS course – a humorous but helpful take on the difference between raster and vector images (humour is another fantastic tool for learning!):

3. Teach the concepts, not just the content

You’ve got your training program established. You have a workbook full of exercises and instructions. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of just having attendees learn the HOW by working through those exercises like robots, without understanding the WHY.

Start with the concepts. Break them down into digestible explanations. Use analogies, diagrams, and practical real-world examples. Then open the floor up for discussion – get attendees to think about how this concept or tool might apply to their own work/life, or where they can see its application. Not only will this help them get their heads around the concepts, but it will also help you grow as a trainer with a better understanding of your target audience.

4. Give attendees prior knowledge of the topic

OK, understandably this is not always feasible – people are coming to you to learn a skill, after all. But where possible you can give students a leg-up with simple, engaging prerequisite material to help them grasp the fundamentals before the day of the actual training. This could be in the form of educational videos, instructions on how to set up the software, and even a beginner’s exercise for the course. By allowing attendees to familiarize themselves with the software and material they’ll come into your training with a rudimentary understanding, instead of blindly.

5. Limit your audience appropriately

Something else to consider is limiting who you run remote training for, based on the difficulty of the training. In our case, the attendees all had some prior experience using other GIS software, which allowed them to navigate QGIS with relative ease. Where possible, try to gain an understanding of the proposed attendees and their relevant skills, and make a judgement call on whether your training is accessible enough to them in the remote format.

6. Preparation!

Another no-brainer here, but too often overlooked. Small things go wrong all the time, and can diminish your appearance of professionalism and competency, as well as disrupt the class. Well in advance:

• Triple-check all material and send out any necessary material to attendees.
• Provide clear instructions to attendees with times, meeting links, and any prerequisites.
• Do an internal “dress rehearsal” to check your camera, mic, slideshows etc.
• Be sure to leave some wriggle room for technical difficulties (at both your end and the attendees).

With more people working from home, or staff scattered geographically, it’s the perfect time to look at converting your training to an online offering, and hopefully, these tips help get you off on the right foot. Take a look at our existing QGIS course information for in-person and online training.

If you have any further ideas, please leave a comment below. Or if you would like to talk to us about our QGIS training offerings, please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

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The recent WADSIH/Halliburton Data Science Bootcamp was the first virtual training event I’ve ever attended. For one week, Dr Satyam Priyadarshy and his team of scientists were guiding us through the world of data science, machine learning, the use of neural networks, and artificial intelligence. The unusual factor was that they were doing so from different parts of India.

On the first day of training, Dr Priyadarshy quoted the ancient parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant to help us understand fundamental data science and machine learning concepts.

So, how do we make sense from the sheer volume of data that is collected nowadays? What are the best ways? It can be very hard to see the big picture when one is overwhelmed by data coming just from one strategy or process in an organisation.

That’s where data science algorithms and tools come in – to find patterns and reveal how seemingly separate processes influence each other. Machine learning allows us to look at multiple variables and predict behaviours.

In this workshop we used Jupyter Notebook, accessible through Anaconda – a scalable data science platform. Because it is browser-based, I could verify each line of python code straight away. I was quite surprised how easy it was to remember syntax and to grasp the content of each learning module. Soon I was looking forward to each of the three-hour coding sessions.

We used python modules to predict trends and derive patterns from seismic data. Neural networks and machine learning algorithms were explained, demystified and illustrated through experience. And to my surprise it was fun! I look forward to implementing this new knowledge in future Gaia projects.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to reach out and see what Gaia Resources can do for you in this rapidly developing space. Comment below, contact me at barbara.zakrzewska@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a chat via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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One of my personal aims for this year was to make better use of the opportunities to access different learning communities and as most of these have been face-to-face meetups, I have had to adapt my expectations on this!

I have been recently accessing the resources of the SheCodes community. I’ve been lucky enough to attend some of their one-day workshops in the past. When a Virtual Coding Party was announced for the 18th April, it seemed to look too good an opportunity to miss. The SheCodes workshops are a really positive and supportive environment to learn a new skill and the step-by-step tutorials are a great way to see your code in action quickly. I was a little uncertain how they would manage to maintain that environment when delivered online to a large number of women coding from home in multiple locations.

There might have been a few more hiccups behind the scenes, but from my perspective, they managed the transition fairly seamlessly. Participants had access to mentors through different chat channels, with the opportunity for ‘face-to-face’ support on video chats if you hit a real blocker. All of the mentors were really responsive online, and mine (thanks Sam!) made sure to check in with our group regularly if he didn’t hear from us.

Despite any initial hesitation I had in how the delivery of the day proceeded, I was able to make it through the Django tutorial on the day (albeit with an extra fifteen minutes at the end to just get that last couple of tasks …). This gave me the ability to see and post to a simple blog, and there are follow-up tutorial steps I can do to take my learning further. Now that I have been able to see Django work with Python scripts, CSS and HTML that I wrote (celebratory moment, there) I feel a lot more confident in my understanding and ability to go back and build on these learnings, either by myself or by reaching out to the marvellous communities I have in my life and work.

Shout out to our own Senior Software Engineer Brianna Williams, who has made sure I feel supported when I need to ask ‘silly’ coding questions or just vent a little bit when things don’t go to plan (when I write bad code). Knowing I have a judgement-free zone to work through the beginner issues makes it so much easier to move on from them instead of getting blocked and losing momentum before I can get really underway. Even when I can’t apply everything I have learnt immediately, I have really enjoyed getting a better understanding of all the different skills that go into the final product, increasing my already significant appreciation of our technical team!

if you’d like to know more about She Codes then please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via sophie.darnell@gaiaresources.com.au.

Sophie

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Not unexpectedly, we’ve had a rise in the number of people asking us for our freely available online QGIS training materials (currently for version 2.18, which is pretty old now – but the course is getting a makeover for version 3.10 soon).  So we did a little digging on who’s using our course now — there’s been a bit more of a spread across the world:

QGIS online training users by country

The uptick in requests this year perhaps coinciding with people looking for things to do when they are at home in isolation.

This approach – create a series of videos that people watch and work through training guides – is one way to deliver online training. We thought we should identify some alternatives and how they might also be deployed.

We could deliver training workshops for our clients in exactly the same way – write a script, record a bunch of screencasts, record separate voice-overs, and then mash them all together with a blend of editing magic to create a course.  While great for our free online QGIS course, it’s not an adequate replacement for face-to-face classroom training.

Lately, we’ve been investigating the capacity of all of our different internet connections from home to see if we can offer a live-streaming style approach.  At the moment, most of us could do that, but there are always going to be issues – connections can drop for a bunch of reasons. So, if a live-streaming approach was going to happen (through whatever videoconferencing software our clients want us to use) it’d be best to break the training up into smaller pieces. This is an advantage, as it’s hard to focus on this type of videoconference for a long period of time (although we’re all getting used to it!).

We’ve also been looking at what schools are doing, using systems such as Google Classroom.  Through this platform, in particular, you can create a nice blend of the two approaches: put together teaching materials, set up videoconferencing sessions to cover those materials, and then combine them with the available assessment frameworks.  With training courses due for some projects in the next few months, we’re working on how these tools may be able to help deliver them, in these new circumstances we find ourselves in.

Necessity is certainly the mother of invention! In the last couple of weeks we’ve gone from having simple stored videos to creating full classes in Google Classroom, so we should be able to resume custom training for all of our clients within another week or so once we finalise our trials.  And then, perhaps, all the people on this map (showing where people who have asked for training live) can have an even better experience!

If you are interested in some classroom based remote training (or even in being our guinea pigs in a couple of external ones that we intend to trial in the next few weeks), then please get in touch with us via training@gaiaresources.com.au and let us know what you are interested in!  Or you can drop us a line on our social media streams – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Stay safe and healthy, and see you online!

Piers

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So it’s a perfect time to up-skill your spatial techniques to get the most out of that hard-won field data.

Summer QGIS Training

Our standard two-day course is run at our HQ in FLUX on St George’s Tce in the centre of Perth, but can be delivered on-site at your location, just for your team. We can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. Our GIS trainers run the courses for a maximum of 6 or 12 attendees, so we often run open courses to minimise the per-person cost of attendance.

We have also developed a successful free QGIS online training package over the last couple of years which has been very popular around the world, as you can see from the map and graph below.

January 2020 courses are filling up, so email or call us to discuss your training requirements. You can read more about just what we offer here: https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/.

Email our general training address at training@gaiaresources.com.au if you’d like to register for training, or get in touch via these email addresses or start a conversation with us on our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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♫ And I like it, I like it…

It’s been nearly four months since we released our free Environmental Quantum GIS Training YouTube series (read the original blog post here) and we couldn’t be happier with the uptake and positive response from the public and the environmental community. We’ve received emails from all over the globe requesting a copy of the training manual and data, and that Status Quo earworm has been with me ever since I saw the map we created showing where they were coming from…

Gaia Resources, in partnership with the State Natural Resource Management Program and the Dieback Working Group, set out to create this training material to give back to the people that look after the environment, one of the core reasons we come to work every day.

What has been really encouraging is the range of professions of people requesting the training material – we have heard from professors, botanists, zoologists, ecologists, marine biologists, environmental health officers, students and PhD candidates from across the globe. It has been particularly exciting knowing that students are gaining knowledge and experience from this material.  Apart from our map above (which tracks where we’ve got emails from people), the region statistics from YouTube also showed a broad geographical range of viewers – 89 regions in total!

We hope to add more videos in future and look forward to seeing more people take advantage of these resources (we might be already working on an update for QGIS 3.0…).

If you would like to get started with this training, please contact us at training@gaiaresources.com.au for a copy of the training data. Our custom and classroom style QGIS training courses are also still available, and information about those and our online training offerings can be found on our website.  We’ve been doing quite a bit of custom training lately – so get in touch if you need help!

We’re always keen to hear your feedback on training and what else you would like to see as part of the video series, so please get in touch with our team via the training@gaiaresources.com.au or start a conversation with us on our  Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Happy mapping!

Tracey

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We have just taken our entire Environmental Quantum GIS (QGIS) training course and offered it free to the internet as Youtube videos for anyone wanting to skill up in using this free and open source desktop mapping software.  This also includes the data and training manuals, which can be made available to you if you drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au.   Just click on the image below to go to the Youtube channel and get started!

You can start with our prerequisite videos that cover how to install the software (version 2.18 is the recommended Long Term Release (LTR) for some time yet) and use our sample data, as well as a quick fire introduction to Geographic Information Systems. After that – or if you are already familiar with those topics – get started on Exercise 1. All the exercises are a mixture of visuals with an environmental flavour, and plenty of hands-on exercises so you can follow along. At that introductory level, everything is covered from data management, symbolising, querying, analysis toolsets and map making.

This is a core part of what Gaia Resources is all about – our CEO Piers Higgs pretty much says it all in the video prologue below (yes, this is where our blooper reel came from that we posted on Facebook a few weeks ago), but just to double up on a special thank-you to the South Coast NRM Group – and in particular Tilo Massenbauer there from the Project Dieback – for helping to make these videos a reality.

Our custom and classroom style QGIS training courses are still available, and information about those and our online training offerings can be found on our website. We’d really be interested to hear how you prefer to learn how to use software like QGIS – are visuals your thing? Do you prefer the hands-on approach? Or do you like to read from a manual?

Drop me a line at chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au, or drop a line to our general training address at training@gaiaresources.com.au.  We’d be keen to hear your feedback on training and what else you would like to see there – so please get in touch via these email addresses or start a conversation with us on our  Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Happy learning!

Chris

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