What is your learning goal?

The general learning objectives for this course don’t take into account your personal motivations for studying, and how you want to use GIS in your work. To make this a more powerful learning experience, we invite you to decide a personal learning goal, and share it with the community so we can help you achieve it

If you wrote down a specific learning goal in the pre-course survey, you can repeat it here. Otherwise, take a few minutes now to decide what you want to achieve by 11th July. Share your learning goal by replying to the Learning goals topic in our community forum below

It’s okay to have modest goals! It’s more valuable to choose a goal that you have a good chance of achieving than to set yourself up for failure by being too ambitious

Think about the GIS skills that your colleagues have, or examples that you’ve seen in reports or published papers. If you’re still not sure what to choose as your goal, look for inspiration in the goals suggested by other learners in our community forum (see below)

Guidance on setting a learning goal

Learning goals work best if they’re SMART:

• Specific - clearly defined rather than open-ended; you need to be able to tell when you’ve achieved it
• Measurable - can you assess progress towards your goal?
• Achieveable - is it realistic to achieve that goal given the scope of this course (see learning objectives), your time, energy and existing knowledge?
• Relevant - aligned with your other responsibilities or career goals
• Time-bound - in these four weeks!

Examples

Examples of SMART learning goals:

• Import my field observations into QGIS
• Combine data from two different sources (what sources - colleagues/organisations/online repositories?)
• Download free environmental data (be specific about what kind of data) and overlay it on my field obs
• Identify potential fieldwork sites by examining maps of the area in QGIS
• Correctly align my field data with layers in a different spatial reference system
• Create a map of my survey locations

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