The use of local data in ESRI Virtual Campus

In the Department of Development and Planning at Aalborg University education and research programs are carried out at various levels within the sphere of GIS. In most of these programs training is required for operating a GIS, training that has up to now been offered as traditional lectures alternated by hands-on sessions. However, with the ESRI Virtual Campus new possibilities have emerged. A ‘localized extension’ to the Virtual Campus is now being developed in our department in cooperation with the ESRI team. The idea is to make exercises available, based on local data, as a part of the Virtual Campus training modules. We consider this important, because the default exercises of course are based on US data, which are in many respects much different from Danish – and other European data. Assignments built on data, that are familiar to the trainees, will appear motivating, and probably make the training more rewarding for the individuals involved. We would like to present our results so far, to the European ESRI user community, together with some work still in progress. We believe, that our experience, and our work together with the very kind and cooperative Virtual Campus development team, may be beneficial to many others users in Europe. A further perspective could even be the development of an ‘EU Virtual Campus’ based on common European data sets. Such data would be much more relevant and comprehensible for the users in Europe than American data.