Syllabus (Spring 2024)

Syllabus (Spring 2024)

GEOG 594A: Culminating Experiences in Geospatial Intelligence

This syllabus is divided into several sections as outlined below. It is essential that you read the entire document, which serves as our course "contract."

• Instructors
• Course Overview
• Required Course Materials
• Assignments and Grading
• Course Schedule
• Course Policies

Instructor(s)

The instructors for this course are Gregory Thomas and Carolynne Hultquist.

Office hours: Please see the Meet Your Instructor page for office hours and additional information about the instructors.

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Course Overview

GEOG 594A: Culminating Experiences in Geospatial Intelligence (3 credits) is a required capstone (seminar) course for Penn State's:

• Graduate Certificate in GEOINT Analytics (GEOINT)
• Intercollege Master of Professional Studies in Homeland Security (iMPS-HLS)

The course is a 16-week seminar and requires up to 15 hours of student activity each lesson. The first six weeks provide the foundation for the geospatial problem you will investigate in greater depth during the last ten weeks. This seminar brings together the threads of the Geospatial Intelligence program and reinforces the standards of professionalism applicable to geospatial intelligence analysis in government and business. The overarching aim is to enhance your understanding of the role of geospatial intelligence, develop individual competencies, reinforce professional concepts, and improve geospatial analytical techniques and methods. GEOG 594A is the culminating experience for the Intelligence and Geospatial Analysis Option of the Intercollege Master of Professional Studies in Homeland Security as well as the final course for the Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Intelligence Analytics. As such, the course expects the student to explore and critically analyze a topical area of interest in appropriate depth. This seminar provides an opportunity to apply the technical tools, concepts, and theories learned in previous coursework while investigating a current analytic problem.

Prerequisites

There are no specific course requirements in order to take GEOG 594A, but it does require courses or previous experience in GIS and remote sensing and a conversation with your advisor.

What Is Expected

This course requires up to 15 hours of student activity each lesson. You will need to check out the course discussion boards regularly. That's where students and instructors share comments, pose questions, and suggest answers. I strongly encourage you to get in the habit of logging in to the course website every day to check in on the class. With only occasional exceptions, I check message boards every day. You can be sure that I will read, but not necessarily respond to every single message. For a more detailed look at what will be covered in each lesson, as well as the due dates for our assignments and activities, please refer to the semester-specific course schedule that is part of this syllabus (see "Course Schedule").

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Course (Seminar) Objectives

To successfully complete GEOG 594A, students must communicate a high level of knowledge of the subject based on their thinking, organization, and technical analysis of the geospatial evidence. The topic of this seminar is to examine the core analytic competencies of the geospatial professional; this is to say, to examine a geospatial analytic problem. The goals of this seminar are for you to:

• identify a real-world problem.
• perform an elementary Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis.
• present and justify the need to study the problem.
• provide the practical ways in which the proposed study should be conducted.
• recognize the ethical and professional issues in the spatial domain.
• evaluate and apply analytical methods in geospatial analysis.

The final deliverables of GEOG 594A are a presentation addressing a geospatial intelligence question and a research paper.

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What is a Seminar?

A "seminar," according to Webster's dictionary, is a group of advanced students studying under a professor with each doing original research and all exchanging results through reports and discussions. The seminar method of teaching is based on Socrates' theory that it is more important to enable students to think for themselves than to merely fill their heads with "right" answers. This theory led him to regularly engage his pupils in dialogues by responding to their questions with questions, instead of answers. This process encourages divergent thinking rather than convergent.

In this seminar, you will be given opportunities to "examine" a common piece of text or idea. After "reading" the common text or idea, open-ended questions are posed. The open-ended questions allow you to think critically, analyze multiple meanings in text, and express ideas with clarity and confidence. After all, a certain degree of emotional safety is felt by participants when they understand that this format is based on dialogue and not debate.

Dialogue is exploratory and involves the suspension of biases and prejudices. Discussion/debate is a transfer of information designed to win an argument and bring closure. Americans are great at discussion/debate but do not dialogue well. However, once teachers and students learn to dialogue, they find that the ability to ask meaningful questions that stimulate thoughtful interchanges of ideas is more important than "the answer." Dialogue is characterized by:

• suspending judgment
• examining our own work without defensiveness
• exposing our reasoning and looking for limits to it
• communicating our underlying assumptions
• exploring viewpoints more broadly and deeply
• being open to disconfirming data
• approaching someone who sees a problem differently not as an adversary, but as a colleague in common pursuit of a better solution.

Participants in a seminar respond to one another with respect by carefully listening instead of interrupting. Students are encouraged to "paraphrase" essential elements of another's ideas before responding, either in support of or in disagreement. This simple act of socialization reinforces appropriate behaviors and promotes team building.

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Required Course Materials

In order to take this course, you need to have the required course materials listed below.  All (other) materials needed for this course are presented online through our course website and in Canvas. In order to access the online materials, you need to have an active Penn State Access Account user ID and password (used to access the online course resources). If you have any questions about obtaining or activating your Penn State Access Account, please contact the Outreach Helpdesk. They can be reached at 1-800-252-3592 in the US or internationally at 814-865-5403 (country code 1). You may reach them by e-mail at psuwd@psu.edu.

You might require Esri's ArcGIS software in this course. Details on acquiring an educational software license can be found on the GIS @ Penn State Website. If you have questions regarding the software, please contact the instructor.

Note

ArcGIS is a commercial software package that is restricted to personal use by the student. It is unlawful for anyone to use this software package without the appropriate commercial license from Esri Inc. to generate personal or corporate profit or revenue.

Using the Library

Just like on-campus students, as a Penn State student, you have a wealth of library resources available to you!

As a user of Penn State Libraries, you can...

• search for journal articles (many are even immediately available in full-text);
• request articles that aren't available in full-text and have them delivered electronically;
• borrow books and other materials and have them delivered to your doorstep;
• access materials that your instructor has put on Electronic Reserve;
• talk to reference librarians in real time using chat, phone, and email;
• ...and much more!

To learn more about their services, see the Library Information for Off-site Users.

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Assignments and Grading

Course length: 16 weeks

Summary: Below you will find a brief summary of the lesson tasks for this course and the associated time frames. Assignment information will be located on each lesson's checklist - so you will need to check there for the full set of details and deliverables. Sometimes the details for each lesson can change, and it's possible that the syllabus may not be updated as quickly as the lesson checklists, so always check specific lesson checklists for the latest details.

Your grade for this course will be based on your course participation and ten (10) deliverables. Each is outlined below. Detailed instructions are located within the online course materials.

Activity	Weight
Deliverable 1: Research Question	5%
Deliverable 2: Refined Question and Bibliography	7.5%
Deliverable 3: Data Exploration Assignment	12.5%
Deliverable 4: Video Presentation & Discussion	12.5%
Deliverable 5: Capstone Proposal	12.5%
Deliverable 6: Workplan	12.5%
Deliverable 7: Project Review	12.5%
Deliverable 8: Presentation	12.5%
Deliverable 9: Final Paper	12.5%

Letter grades will be based on the following percentages:

A	93.0-100%
A-	90.0-92.9%
B+	87.0-89.9%
B	83.0-86.9%
B-	80.0-82.9%
C+	77.0-79.9%
C	70.0-76.9%
D	60.0-69.9%
F	<60.0%
X	Unsatisfactory (student did not participate)

Acceptable participation:

• Offers solid analysis, without prompting, to move the conversation forward
• Demonstrates deep knowledge of the text and the question
• Actively listens to other participants
• Offers clarification and/or follow-up that extends the conversation
• Remarks often refer back to specific parts of the text

Unacceptable participation:

• Offers little commentary
• Is ill-prepared with little understanding of the text and question
• Does not listen to others, offers no commentary to further the discussion
• Distracts the group by offering off-topic questions and comments
• Ignores the discussion and its participants

Late Work Policy

One of the many advantages of taking courses online is that it affords you a degree of flexibility in when and how you complete your assignments which might be more challenging to achieve in a face-to-face classroom setting. However, taking courses online does not mean that you've got the autonomy to do and submit the work when you wish.

In order for us to move through the material as a group, it's important that each of you completes your assignments on time. Late is defined as submitted anytime after 11:59 p.m. on the day on which the assignment is due. This means if you procrastinate and turn it in at 12:05 am the next morning, it is late.

Assignments will be assessed a 10% penalty for each 24-hour period late they are (i.e., 12:00 am on Wednesday through 11:59 pm on Wednesday is 10%, and so on).

Life happens. Inevitably, you will have some legitimate situation or emergency arise during the semester that is going to hinder your ability to complete work on time. You should always communicate these occurrences to your instructor as soon as possible. It takes but a minute to call or email and give me a courtesy heads-up. I'm much more willing to work with you if I know what's going on. Falling off the radar for an extended period of time and then later requesting additional time retroactively is not the appropriate way to communicate a problem with your instructor. Let me know what's happening when it's happening; that gives me the best chance of helping you out.

Procrastination doesn't pay - Technology is far from perfect, and, generally, it only fails when you really need it to work. If you play with fire and wait until the very last second to attempt to submit your work in Canvas, you may get burned. This is an easy enough problem for us to avoid - you have a full week to complete your work, so don't wait until that last second to turn it in.

Make-up Exam Policy

This course does not have any exams.

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