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Experiences from online and classroom education in hydroinformaticsUniversities and other higher education institutions involved in water-related engineering education are facing new challenges in offering life long learning services and online educational support. Both the curricula and the form of delivery are changing, as contemporary water problems require interdisciplinary approaches involving diverse and up to date expertise maintained via continuous professional development. Hydroinformatics education faces similar challenges in developing relevant curricula and finding appropriate combinations of course delivery to its target group. This article presents experiences from delivering two hydroinformatics courses in the fields of Flood Modelling for Management (FMM) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) in River basin Management that in recent years have been delivered both online and in classroom settings. Comparisons between the two modes of delivery are provided, with the conclusion that online education in this field although still faced with many challenges has a promising potential for meeting future educational needs.
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IMAS Web Mapping Services (WMS)The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) pursues multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work to advance understanding of temperate marine, Southern Ocean, and Antarctic environments. The IMAS Geoserver catalogues IMAS geospatial data, and hosts a number of other data layers from its collaborators.
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Collaborative damage mapping for emergency response: the role of Cognitive Systems EngineeringRemote sensing is increasingly used to assess disaster damage, traditionally by professional image analysts. A recent alternative is crowdsourcing by volunteers experienced in remote sensing, using internet-based mapping portals. We identify a range of problems in current approaches, including how volunteers can best be instructed for the task, ensuring that instructions are accurately understood and translate into valid results, or how the mapping scheme must be adapted for different map user needs. The volunteers, the mapping organizers, and the map users all perform complex cognitive tasks, yet little is known about the actual information needs of the users. We also identify problematic assumptions about the capabilities of the volunteers, principally related to the ability to perform the mapping, and to understand mapping instructions unambiguously. We propose that any robust scheme for collaborative damage mapping must rely on Cognitive Systems Engineering and its principal method, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), to understand the information and decision requirements of the map and image users, and how the volunteers can be optimally instructed and their mapping contributions merged into suitable map products. We recommend an iterative approach involving map users, remote sensing specialists, cognitive systems engineers and instructional designers, as well as experimental psychologists.