Authors: Eva Missoni and Barbara Hofer, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria
The EO4GEO Training Material Catalogue allows educators and instructors to access and search through state-of-the-art material designed by the EO4GEO partners. The content, provided under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-SA 4.0, can be used and adapted for any teaching purpose. All the interested public is welcome to browse through the catalogue, use the material, or get inspiration for their own teaching purposes or projects. To ensure the quality of the provided material, the content currently undergoes an internal evaluation process.
How are the topics selected?
As the EO*GI field is very broad, the currently available training material is oriented to the demands for specific training actions of our project partners. The coordination takes place through strong cooperation between partners to analyse the needs for basic material to be used for — and across — training actions. The material also aligns with the three guiding subsectors of the EO4GEO project, namely smart cities, climate change, and integrated applications. Examples of content addressing the three subsectors are, respectively, the identification of local heat islands, the Copernicus climate change service, and flood mapping with radar data.
While topics for training materials are selected based on needs and requirements for upskilling people, they also address different previous knowledge and background in EO*GI: from beginners who are interested in getting first insights or basic qualifications in the field, to people who already have certain knowledge or experience, up to professionals who would like to gain additional skills in a specific field of application.
Which materials are available? — A sneak peek on topics and types
The material covers important aspects of the EO*GI domain in a form of presentation. We used business processes and interviews with partners from the industry to identify skills gaps and skills of future needs. Two streams turned out to be of particular interest:
1. Material for beginner-level to familiarize with the EO*GI field, its potential and possibilities in different fields of application.
2. Certain technical skills like programming, cloud computing, machine learning.
The catalogue picks up these requests by providing material on entry-level (teaching material but also informative videos) and also content inputs to push forward new developments, like machine learning.
The material contains general concepts on the one hand and introductions to the application in applied areas on the other side. More concretely, besides a strong focus on Copernicus Services, the catalogue offers:
- introductory material to EO*GI, reproducibility research in the Geosciences, EO data sources, change detection;
- material on Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), preprocessing and classification as well as validation of EO products.
- material on applied topics, like identification of heat islands, flood mapping with radar data, or agricultural monitoring.
In the future, the training material catalogue will grow subsequently, as further content is developed. When it gets to formats and content types, the use of interactive content display is actively encouraged within the framework, including for example the use of Jupyter Notebooks, the platform Terrascope, H5P, etc.
An innovative approach to material development and provision
To be easily adaptable, distributable, and annotatable were the main requirements for the design of training material. Reveal JS offered the possibility to create a presentation-framework that — besides classical slides — allows the integration of interactive learning content.
The EO4GEO training material catalogue is provided with an easy-to-use interface that not only informs about what to expect from the content and intended learning outcomes; it also indicates which concepts of the EO*GI domain are covered, the educational level of the material, and provides the terms under which reuse is possible. Furthermore, the site allows a preview of the slide decks and offers direct access to the material.
Want to upskill for a new Job? Body of Knowledge (BoK): concepts as linking elements between Job Offers and Training Material
Materials come with metadata-annotations from the EO*GI Body of Knowledge, allowing to search and find content along with the concepts. For each material, you are provided with information about the BoK-concepts.
With the BoK-Matching-Tool it is even possible to compare the training resources with information from Job Offers along with concepts and identify which resources match existing skills gaps. In the future, such a comparison will also be possible to identify matching EO4GEO training actions.
As an example, a comparison between the Job Offer Copernicus expert and the training material for Copernicus Service — Land resulted in a 20% Matching Score. That means that knowing only about the Copernicus Service — Land is by far not enough to become a Copernicus expert. What else needs to be known can be seen from the description of the job offer for a Copernicus expert.
Pay a visit to the training material catalogue and provide us with your feedback if you like!
