There are many excellent resources available to support spatial training needs. The following list offers a sample of these. The CISR also offers a variety of spatial workshops for a hands-on approach to learning these methods and techniques.
ESRI Virtual Campus
UCSC’s Higher Education Site License for ESRI products includes a subscription that entitles the campus community to free, unlimited access to online courses through ESRI’s Virtual Campus. The following courses are available to all UC students, faculty, and staff at no charge. For more information on this program and request procedures visit the ITS Software Support site for ArcGIS.
ESRI Podcasts
The ESRI Instructional and Speaker Series offers free short audio recordings that focus on specfic topics such as tips to improve your spatial workflow, tricks for optimizing your geodatabase, updates on new software features, and technology insights from ESRI’s community, business partners, and staff. ESRI podcasts are a free and easy way to get the latest news and information from ESRI.
Self-paced documentation library
There are several documentation, reference, and Quick Start books available for SELF-PACED training in ArcGIS applications and extensions. This documentation provides concise and easy to understand directions for using their software products. These files are pdf versions (stored and accessible through the CISR network) of the same hardcopy manuals that are shipped with the software. The hardcopy manuals are catalogued and available on Reserve in the Center.
Other Resources
Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
The CSISS GIS Cookbook is a collection of simple descriptions and illustrations of GIS methods written with minimal GIS jargon. Recipes cover two GIS software platforms, ArcView 3.x and ArcGIS 8/9.x.
University of Arkansas – ArcGIS Introduction
The Libary at University of Arkansas offers a basic tutorial adapted from some of the concepts presented in ESRI’s Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop book. The tutorial is designed to allow a user to quickly get started with ArcGIS™ applications without actually having to go through the extensive ESRI tutorial exercises.
AMNH Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP)
The American Museum of Natural History’s NCEP program is a global initiative, which seeks to improve the practice of biodiversity conservation by improving training in biodiversity conservation. NCEP targets educators working with undergraduate and graduate students, and trainers working with conservation professionals. There are modules on more than 100 topics relevant to biodiversity conservation, including an introduction to remote sensing, remote sensing for ecological modeling, species distribution modeling, and geographic information systems (in development).
AMNH Biodiversity Informatics Facility
The American Museum of Natural History’s Biodiversity Informatics Facility offers a variety of geospatial training and educational resources in remote sensing, species distribution modeling, and GIS for freshwater conservation. The site also has a great series of interactive tools that help to illustrate Remote Sensing concepts.
Short’s Remote Sensing Tutorial
An extensive online remote sensing tutorial developed by NASA scientist, Dr. Nicholas Short.
Canada Centre for Remote Sensing
The Canada Centre for Remote Sensing hosts a variety of remote sensing training and educational materials.
OSGeo Education and Curriculum Project
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is building a repository of educational material related to geoscience in general, and open source geospatial software specifically. Several tutorials are available in their Educational Content Inventory, and there is an active community interested in building and promoting these resources.