The course will be held over two days – 18 and 19th November at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via training@gaiaresources.com.au or call us on 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gus

The post Two day QGIS training course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The course will be held over two days on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd June at our office on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD. 

You will learn the fundamentals of GIS and the QGIS software, including:

• Coordinate Reference Systems
• Vector and Raster data
• Creating & editing shapefile data
• Symbology & styling data
• Georeferencing images
• And the most fun part: Making maps

We keep the class size small (10 people or fewer) so that our trainer can spend plenty of one-on-one time with you and make sure everyone gets maximum value and learnings from the material.

If the Beginner’s course doesn’t quite meet your requirements or you’d like something more advanced, we can also customise the course to include advanced features important to your enterprise. For companies looking to train multiple staff we can also deliver this course at your own facilities, or even offer a condensed one-day version.

We have limited spaces available for our June course, and we’d love to have you there! If you’d like to register, or if you’d like to discuss more custom training requirements, please contact us via: 

Email: training@gaiaresources.com.au
Phone: 08 9227 7309

You can also read more about our training here: https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/services/training/ or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post EOFY – QGIS Training Course appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Remote learning: tips for trainers to maximise success appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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.

The post Data Science Upskilling Bootcamp appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Remote training options appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We are always looking to improve GRID to create further efficiencies for the user and increasing data quality. One suggestion that arose during the workshop was to see whether it was possible to enter field data on a tablet device in remote areas. This would allow SCNRM staff to plot their work areas, fill out form fields and upload photos straight to their newly created GRID feature.

On the second day of the workshop Tracey, together with a few of the workshop participants, went out to Mt Manypeaks north-east of Albany, to a granite outcrop with cultural significance at the edge of Lake Pleasant View. SCNRM Project Officer for Cultural Heritage Peter ‘Twigg’ Twigg has been working there with local indigenous teams focussing on weed management.

Twigg and Ray used GRID on the iPad to perform a variety of common tasks. With Tracey’s guidance, Twigg was able to:

• add features to his GRID instance including points, lines and polygons, and upload PDFs and images,
• take photos on the iPad and load them directly into GRID – a great time saver as it avoids double-handling images back at the office.

Of course, we also discovered some of the current limitations of using GRID in a web browser on a mobile device, such as:

• employing tablets with 4G connectivity would have been helpful, but we were able to hotspot from our phones and use SCNRM’s wifi-only iPads without much hassle,
• GRID does not yet have a mobile responsive design, so there were some limitations and display issues such as some menus overlapping, and a popup the popup window that couldn’t be closed.

So, future enhancements necessary to use GRID in the field would include:

• a mobile-responsive design,
• a GPS location button that users can tap so the map zooms to their current location,
• offline data entry when field work is done outside the range of mobile networks.

Please note, this will be the last face-to-face training session we undertake for the foreseeable future, given the COVID-19 shutdowns in place across Australia. However, we do freely provide a great set of QGIS online training videos for those who would like to upskill during this downtime. (You can keep up to date with Gaia Resources responses to the COVID-19 in these posts).

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered in this post, please drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex

The post Testing GRID in the field appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Discussing the important matters of fire escapes and where to buy the best coffee.

When writing the course material, we ask ourselves:

• what skills and outcomes should people who are completely new to GIS gain from this course?
• what are the most effective teaching / learning formats?

1. Course outcomes

For someone with no prior GIS experience, being thrown in the deep end can be very daunting. There is a steep learning curve when getting acquainted with a new user interface, spatial data types, and some of the more “WTF?” concepts of GIS. Our aim is to present the material in a way that makes sense to a novice and have them leave the course with an understanding of the fundamentals, as well as practical experience in using the QGIS software. The way in which we achieve this is discussed below.

2. Effective teaching and learning

It’s well-established that humans aren’t machines, ergo have variations in both their abilities and the ways in which they learn. There are, however, trends we can use to best direct how we run our QGIS training. Consider the VARK learning styles model, which breaks learning styles into four categories, with research showing that the majority of people (61%) learn best through employing two or more modes. In our QGIS course, we present the material using a combination of all four modes – a detailed, step-by-step user guide; live demonstrations on the big screen; interactive, practical exercises; and a trainer that won’t shut up describes key learning points and who encourages discussion.

The VARK learning styles.

An essential part of being able to teach a beginner in any topic is being able to put yourself in their shoes and present the main learning points in a logical and digestible manner. We achieve this in a number of ways in our QGIS course, such as:

• providing visual learning aids such as demonstrations and an animated slideshow,
• providing examples that relate to the attendee’s careers and roles,
• combining self-paced, supervised exercises together with the trainer working through exercises on the projector screen (without ‘doing the work’ for people),
• asking attendees to answer questions after each learning module,
• varying the pace and teaching style throughout the day to cater for mental fatigue, and
• maintaining engagement and focus through (poor) humour and the occasional (terrible) analogy. Humour is an effective teaching tool for engaging participants and redirecting focus.

As a trainer, the most satisfying part of my job is seeing people have “Aha! moments” – those moments where they suddenly understand the fundamentals of a topic they have previously been baffled by. Anecdotally, I’ve mostly encountered Aha! moments when drawing diagrams or using analogies.

In Darwin, we inadvertently created a wave of Aha! moments on the topic of Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS). Our training data focuses on an area in southern WA, but for the Darwin training Chris put together an exercise looking at a national park in the NT. This simple switch in geolocation forced attendees to apply what they’d learnt about CRS, and switch from a WA-centric CRS to one that worked for the NT. Several people commented that they finally understood CRS. This is a great example of how talking about a topic won’t necessarily get the point across to someone, yet a simple additional step – making them apply that concept to a practical exercise – helps the penny drop.

Chris answers the tough questions during one of our one-day courses in Darwin.

Every time we run the QGIS training we take away valuable observations and user feedback, and we are continually improving the course content and how it is delivered. We’re looking to bring our Beginner’s course to regional parts of WA and other States in Australia, and we’re currently working on new material for a potential Intermediate course (so stay tuned)!

If you’d like to attend our QGIS Beginner’s Course, or even discuss a more tailored training program for you or your staff, please drop us a line at training@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Tracey

The post NT QGIS training: the pursuit of effective teaching methods appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The sunset over Darwin. 

After experiencing another dry and extreme fire season in 2019, the Forum was an important gathering of fire practitioners, park managers, policy-makers, ecologists, researchers and carbon industry experts to share knowledge to improve our understanding and practice of savanna fire management. To an outsider – like myself last year – it may seem a bit counter-intuitive that we would consider lighting fires to reduce our carbon footprint; but on a regional scale across two States and a Territory that is precisely what is happening in a deliberate carbon abatement and land management effort. Through careful planning and application of the on-ground knowledge of traditional owners, the controlled burning of savanna grasslands in the early dry season (typically April – June) greatly reduces the more severe late dry season bushfires that are so destructive to whole landscapes and ecosystems. The less burning, of course, means less carbon is emitted into our atmosphere.

The Forum kicked off with Bilawara Lee of the local Larrakia people giving over 320 delegates a warm Welcome to Country, followed by a keynote address from Luke Gosling (MP for Solomon). From there the scene was set with a summary of the 2019 fire weather from the Bureau of Meteorology where we heard about the fluctuations in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole – a strangely fascinating interaction I won’t go into here but if you are interested BoM provide a monthly Climate Model Summary to describe how these two factors influence weather patterns across Australia. In particular, they help explain why we’ve had much drier conditions in the last two years.

Rohan Fisher from the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research then presented some great time-series of the burning patterns across WA, the NT and Queensland and stressed how “engagement with traditional knowledge and science in a very honest, open and respectful way… has resulted in the decrease in fire.” The screenshot below is an example where you can see the substantial month-by-month differences between 2019 and 2004 when similar climatic conditions prevailed but the fire management practices of recent times were not being coordinated. It is pretty telling that 44,800 square kilometres (or 4.48 million hectares) more area burned in 2004, and most of it in the late Dry months. By the way, SBS and other media outlets picked up on this good news story with interviews of Willie Rioli and Rohan, and the full set of NAFI animations and graphics produced for the Forum can be found here.

Late dry season burns in 2004 and 2019 across the north of Australia (snapshot of NAFI animation). Burning for the two years is shown by month on a histogram view (left) and corresponding map view (right).

There were some really interesting talks over the two days from ranger groups enlightening us with their experience and success stories on country, economic analysts considering the price of carbon and how to assess co-benefits, and scientists looking at biodiversity research and the relationship between fire management and ecosystem health. It was a dizzying array of topics that looked at important considerations for the industry, with something for everyone involved. A few highlights for me were the breakout session for fire ecology and biodiversity, where for example the Australian Wildlife Conservancy gave us a case study about the impact of fire on the fragile habitat of the purple crowned fairywren. 

The Department of Environment Natural Resources presented their research on native mammal population declines in different landscape types across the Northern Territory. In the plenary discussion of fire management on the world stage, we learned about the world-leading fire management practices in Australia compared to other savanna regions, and differences between Australia’s carbon abatement framework and other country’s carbon trading markets. Videos presentations are often a fun change-up, and I think everyone enjoyed the Lion King soundtrack that accompanied a video about the knowledge sharing expedition to Botswana – where indigenous rangers passed on knowledge of fire weather, ignition and management principles were passed on to local authorities there.

I’ve found the Forum to be a great way to network and meet people from a range of professions, and to get a perspective on the challenging activities these people get involved in – from not-for-profit organisations like the World Wildlife Fund to for-profit carbon project consultancies and public servants.

Enjoying a sunset drink and a catch-up at the Forum networking event with Ellie Boyle and Leigh-Ann Woolley from the World Wildlife Fund.

After chatting to a few people about small mammal recovery and ecosystem recovery, one of the things I spent some time looking into was how QGIS, Saga  and integrated field data collection solutions like QField or Fulcrum could play an important role in  planning and evaluation of carbon abatement projects. In fact, as part of the Forum we ran two QGIS training courses on the Thursday and Friday, so I was keen to see how that free and open source product could help industry practitioners beyond the basic production of maps.

On that topic, it was Susanne Casanova (Territory NRM) and others like Ben Corey (Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions) who got me thinking about how the industry needs to consider other fire metrics beyond the early vs late dry season burnt area statistics, and consider things like fragmentation (or distance between remnant vegetation patches) in measuring the success of a burning program. As far as I can ascertain, early Dry Season burning and its lower intensity fires generally result in more patchy landscapes with greater opportunity for small native mammals to recover. [Note: I would love to learn more from the experts in this field, and understand there are many factors that influence fire behaviour].  These small bits of remaining habitat are important pieces in the biodiversity puzzle as they provide refuge from predators and feral animals as well as food sources. An analysis could be looking at fragmentation and these distance measures in relation to the range distance of a particular endangered species (or collection of species). The resulting data can be an important measure for both planning burning regimes and after to understand how effective the approach has been. QGIS landscape ecology plug-ins together with Sentinel-2 (or higher resolution imagery) look like they provide some great potential for adding value here.

Tracey will give a recap of the QGIS training we have been running lately, but as the first run of it in Darwin I think it was a great success. We had nine attendees for these two one-day courses with representation from the Northern Territory Government, pastoral groups, NRM fire managers and environmental consultancies. Great facilities at the centrally located Darwin Innovation Hub which we will use again, and from all accounts everyone really learned a lot about how to start using this powerful software in their own environmental activities. From the feedback Tracey and I received, we know people wanted another day or an intermediate session, so I will be looking at ways to make that happen and to continue building capacity in the north.

If any of this recap has piqued your interest, or you want to talk about your own adventures in fire management or use of spatial tools like QGIS, please feel free to start a conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or e-mail me directly on chris.roach@gaiaresources.com.au

Chris

The post Savanna Fire Forum Review appeared first on Gaia Resources.

She Codes cupcakes

Tracey, one of our environmental scientists and support specialist writes “She Codes was a great experience overall. I have been learning the basics of Python coding online, but the tutorials were quite dry and heavy on information. In the She Codes workshop we used a practical exercise that was both informative and fun – coding a basic video game where you guide a turtle around a screen chomping on ‘space cabbages’. Having something fun and engaging really made the learning curve less daunting and kept my focus, and each module felt rewarding as my turtle gained new abilities.”

Barbara, one of our spatial analysts said “There was a good choice of subjects – WordPress, Django, Python and HTML with CSS – and plenty of mentors to help out with problems or just to talk to. Each had a badge with their field of expertise so it was easy to find answers. I also have to mention the famous cupcakes – they were delicious ;)”

She Codes founder Kate Kirwin says “This initiative has truly created a space for women to be welcomed into the tech industry, and I’m more than pleased to announce that 40% of the women who were part of the 2019 pilot program have now secured new roles within tech”. With a combination of in-person and virtual mentoring, She Codes Plus provides successful participants with the essentials required to pursue careers in technology-focused roles. Conducted on a part-time basis, participants undertake four unique projects focussed on building web applications using the HTML/CSS, Python, Django and React.

She Codes coders in Saturdays workshop (photo courtesy of She Codes)

In our Brisbane office, Sophie and Megan attended the Brisbane PyLadies chapter last week. PyLadies is a mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Their mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings. PyLadies also aims to provide a friendly support network for women and a bridge to the larger Python world.

Sophie reports that “Megan and I braved last Thursday’s meeting despite pouring rain – we were both a bit damp, but enthusiastic! We heard Toni Sefton speak on her personal experience getting into coding and Python using a less-than-direct path. She was open about the challenges in overcoming her own doubts; being willing to take a risk on this change in direction in her life despite feeling that she still had too much to learn. One of the key factors in helping her to develop her own skills was having a supportive mentor. This helped to also remind me of the importance of providing that support and encouragement when friends and colleagues show an interest in expanding their knowledge and skills in the future.

Then Bertrand Caron spoke about different approaches to writing modern Python code. While a lot of it was beyond my skill level, he helpfully provided his slides for future reference, and I am sure I will be looking back on these with interest once my skills allow it! It was great to see part of the supportive and motivated coding community learning together.”

Our team are looking out for more opportunities like this to participate and learn, so if you know of other great initiatives like She Codes or PyLadies, then please feel free leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post She {Codes} and PyLadies appeared first on Gaia Resources.

♫ 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

The post Mapping All Over the World appeared first on Gaia Resources.

On this trip, we provided an overview of GRID’s new features with staff from the various offices of the South-West Catchments Council (SWCC).  Staff came from across the South-West region of Western Austalia, including some remote participants connecting via Google Hangouts.  The Bunbury Regional Library provided a computer room to serve as our “classroom” for the day and was conveniently just a stone’s throw from Café 140 (side note: they didn’t have cafes as nice as this one when I lived in Bunbury!).  As seems to be expected when you hire rooms, there were some technical difficulties with the projector and wifi, but we pushed on.

These sorts of events provide us with the perfect opportunity to interact directly with our customers to really immerse them in the material we are presenting, seek feedback on how GRID is performing for them, and build a picture of what enhancements and functionality that they would like to see.  As we revealed each feature in detail and fielded questions from participants a few things became apparent…

GRID can’t be a one size fits all

GRID serves multiple purposes for multiple people, even just within one organisation. Among attendees that day alone we had people who relied on SWCC GRID for data management, data extraction for further interrogation in a desktop GIS program (mainly QGIS, which we have been helping SWCC with for a while now – and released our environmental training as a free on-line course recently), a range of mapping and reporting tasks, investigating what activities are taking place in neighbouring regions, and even managing volunteer groups and their associated on-ground activities.

With such a diverse range of applications by the people that use it, it’s clear GRID needs to be versatile, and any additions we make must both cater to the needs of one group of people whilst also not limiting others. This balance can be delicate and tricky to achieve, despite our clients all being in the NRM space, and is something we are continually attempting to improve.

Showing is better than telling

As we’ve come to suspect, it seems that most people don’t read our email communications or the release notes that document the new features that we release in each new GRID build, so although we had excitedly described these new features previously, most people in the room were unaware the features even existed.  As an example, as we described the ‘new’ filtering options (which were released in 1.3 back in September 2017), faces lit up around the room.

“I didn’t even know I could do that”.

“That’s going to be great for ____”

This has led us to rethink the way we announce upgrades and features in future and really assess the best way to convey the information so that it reaches people, and they truly understand the new features and what they can do… perhaps time for more online videos!

Having time for discussions is critical

With these GRID training ‘update’ sessions, Chris and I have endeavoured to create a comfortable training environment without too rigid of a structure. The benefit to this personable approach is participants relax and talk to us honestly about anything and everything GRID-related, giving us some very valuable feedback. The little ‘whinges’ that people may have had at the back of their mind tend to get expressed, and often they are actually things that are caused by a misunderstanding, and many are already solvable, or are easily fixable.

Best of all, the things that aren’t immediately rectifiable help us to create two lists – a ‘Fix It’ list for immediate investigation when we get back to the office, and a ‘Wishlist’ for future upgrades. Being face to face with clients really allows us to flesh out Wishlist ideas and bounce them off others in the room for refining.  This all goes into our work towards the next roadmapping session we will have with our customers for GRID (where we’ll roll out the GRID Bucks, just like we did last year).

Chris discussing enhancement ideas with Joanna while we show off some shiny new GRID features.

This particular session with SWCC was jam-packed with information, both giving and receiving, and went well and truly went over schedule. But the invaluable feedback we received made every minute worthwhile.

Some other learning curves for me in particular:

• Some of our descriptions of the new features were a little confusing for participants, because I had assumed (wrongly!) that all attendees were well-practiced in using GRID. We need to put aside any assumptions and cater to the least experienced people in the room, which can be a real challenge – but that’s something to work on in future.
• During demos, everything can go wrong will go wrong. Wifi, projectors, remote connections, internet speeds… So we need to be (even more) prepared, set up exceedingly early, and have a backup plan for everything – and make sure a good cafe is close by!
• And speaking of which, put a time limit on coffee breaks or you’ll lose half the class for an extended period!

We always love catching up with the crew at SWCC and for me, I got to put more faces to the names I hear on the phone.  I know that all our team are very grateful to have such a fantastic client relationship and look forward to putting all the feedback to use.

If you’d like to know more about GRID, or how we can deliver training for you, then feel free to contact either email myself or Chris, call us on (08) 92277309 or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

The post You can’t beat face-to-face interaction! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Free QGIS Online Training appeared first on Gaia Resources.