Mentor Link visit to Kaskaskia College

In early January a three day visit was held at Kaskaskia College as part of the American Association of Community College MentorLinks program which is funded by the National Science Foundation.  The major goal of this project is to develop a geospatial technology program at Kaskaskia.  During the visit the AACC MentorLinks mentor, Vince DiNoto, worked with the local project team on their goals, met with local leadership and advisory committee and presented a workshop to faculty and staff.

On the first day of the visit we met with the IT staff to insure that the computer laboratory was properly configured and added local Illinois data.  In addition, learning modules were loaded for the faculty and staff to use for continued growth after the workshops.  After the laboratory was set-up, the group went to an adjunct faculty dinner where the mentor spoke to the group about integration of GST across the curriculum.

On the second day of the visit an introductory workshop was held for 18 members of the faculty and staff representing 15 different subject areas.  All data used in the workshop was local Illinois data since it is critical to understand local geography and get buy-in from participants; this includes faculty, staff and students.  The hands-on workshop touched on topics of shapefiles and raster images, projections, loading data, clipping and merging, georeferencing, digitizing, creating new layers, and using catalogue features.

After the workshop was completed, the Kaskaskia 3D printer laboratory was visited and a discussion was held on printing in Digital Elevation Models (3D).  While no direct solution was discovered, a very fruitful discussion was held.

The final event for the day was a meeting of the Kaskaskia Advisory Committee for GST.  This was an extremely good meeting of people with a real interest in the developing of the new program at the college in geospatial technology.  Numerous different fields were represented including: agriculture, civil engineering, land surveying, local government and educators.

On the third day of the visit the mentor met with college leadership; this included the President, Vice-Presidents, Deans, IT Director, Distance Learning Coordinator, and Network Administrator.  These meetings were in a small group setting and each revolved about the needs from that specific area (administrator) to enhance the development of a successful program.  Numerous small issues were worked out that will allow the program to move forward in the development.  These included working on virtual servers, institutionalizing GST, distance learning methods and remote application servers. At the end of the day the local development group met to work on specific issues including the offering of the first classes in the fall of 2012.