This class was a ride and a requirement for my major. I would not recommend it to someone who just needs a GE because this is an intensive course. If you are interested in making maps and GIS, this is a great class to start with to tests all of the basis GIS waters there are. This was my first onlinen course, but I chose to do an in-person lab and it made the class more tolerable and manageable. It is not too difficult to get an B+ or A-, but if you do everything correctly and take the time to do a few more extra things, you can receive an A/A+.

The WEEKLY FORUM posts are generally written responses with the occasional photo attachment to a prompt. Many times we had to read up on a subject and write about our thoughts and respond to fellow classmates. Easy and practically guaranteed 10% of your grade if you do all of them on time.

The WEEKLY QUIZZES would ask questions from the informational videos the professor posts and also information from the textbook. You do not need to buy the textbook because it can be found online and at the library. They would open on Monday and be due Sunday night with UNLIMITED ATTEMPTS between that time period, BUT there is a 90 MINUTE WAIT TIME IN BETWEEN ATTEMPTS, so if you are doing them at the last minute and you didn't get a score you wanted, you are out of luck. Also, after each attempt, you only get the score and NOT which questions you missed. So these quizzes do take a good chunk of time to complete. My regret is not getting a 100 on each one because they are easier points than the weekly assignments.

WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS- Weekly assignments are TIME CONSUMING. No surprise there. I am bad with technology, but the tutorials posted on CCLE give you step by step instructions on how to complete your project in order to get a standard outcome. There are not too difficult to follow, but it is best to work on two monitors or a split screen in order to play the CCLE video alongside the QGIS software.

WHAT SUCKS- Even if you do the entire assignment completely correct, you will only receive 80% of the points. I missed out on points to get a 100 on each assignment because I could have made the assignments more aesthetically appealing, or add more extra data. I understand that this is a part of what it takes to get a 100, but I didn't know how to do the things the other students were doing to their maps in order to receive that 100. ALSO, the professor almost never responds to your emails. Your only source of help is mainly your TAs on the weekdays. There is also a Piazza forum for students, but mainly everyone is unresponsive to everyone else's issues or they are just as confused.

FINAL PROJECT- I spent countless hours, leading to days, on my final project. It had become optional in light of the situation, but I wanted the chance to boost my grade to an A. As long as you do everything you can for this project and truly do your research and make more aesthetically appealing visuals of your maps and data, I believe you will be fine.

I learned how important map-making is in our world. Now that I am reflecting on the content of this course and all of the skills that I learned, it makes the class seem worthwhile. Now every time I see a map online, I get an idea of how that map was made and how map makers still have an important job in today's society. Also, all of the assignments we did in this course can be put into a personal professional portfolio.

Grade breakdown:
5%- Syllabus Quiz
10%- Weekly Forum Posts
50%- Weekly Assignments
20%- Final Project
15%- Weekly Quizzes

If you have no background in this field, do not take this class. If you do not want to dedicate 20 - 25 hours a week on coursework, do not take this class. If you want to work hard for a grade but don't want to compromise your efforts in other classes, do not take this class. If you really think you can save everything to the last minute, please don't take this class. If you come up with really legitimate excuses for things being late, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. This is not, by any means, a beginner's course. I took it online. And while the professors neatly lays out how the course will work, the amount of time this class will take from you is shocking. Every week there is a required weekly post (based on a reading and or screencast), a weekly lab (to instruct you on the assignment), the weekly ridiculously frustrating assignment and the weekly quiz (based on the required readings and assignment). And if you don't do any one of these things by their weekly due date, you receive no credit. If you do not complete the weekly quiz, you cannot access the next week's material. So you have to take the quiz (regardless if you get credit for it or not) in order to move on. The average grade on the midterm for more than 200 students: C-. Unless this is your interest, or the only class your taking, don't take this class. It goes past a satisfying challenge to just pure anxiety about whether you are going to be able to mimic hundreds of detailed computer programming steps ( I am talking about the weekly assignment). Should you take this class, here is my advice. 1. Look up QGIS and Query Building (and then drop the class). 2. (If you are brave and anticipate my over dramatization of the difficulty of this course and persist), GO TO LAB, just GO. 3. and this should be the first, start your weekly assignment early in the week, there are so many things than can and will go wrong, you will thank yourself for this. 4. Do not procrastinate, this class is on a tight schedule and leaves the stragglers behind. 5. Try to enjoy yourself, despite it all, you will come out of this class a map-making machine, and that is a pretty satisfying feeling.

I really liked this class! There is a bit of work though, but if you focus, you can get it all done in one day. All of the modules are unlocked Monday at 9am, and everything within the module for the week is due Sunday at 11:59pm. Each week, you have to complete a discussion post (200 words + response), quiz (unlimited attempts), and a project/assignment, which is by far the most time consuming and frustrating. I would dedicate one day of the week (I did either 9am-4pm or 5pm-11pm) to get it all done, and finished early if I didn't run into issues.

That being said, they basically give you a step-by-step on how to do EVERY assignment, so I never got below an 85. Just follow along to the videos, and you'll get a good grade. For the "lab" (discussion), only the first two weeks are required, and then it's optional. It's really just a place for you to go while you do your assignment and the TA can help you with anything.

Lastly, there wasn't really a midterm or final. The assignment/project that week would just be a little harder, and then you'd be done. I finished this course Monday of week 10 so I could focus on my other classes and got a 90 on the final assignment. Overall, if you need to take this class, you'll be fine. It's a bit daunting at first, but it gets easier as you get adjusted. Would recommend for a somewhat easy A.

If you're a geography student, odds are you will have to take this class.
There are weekly GIS projects that are not super difficult, but they are pretty time consuming for most weeks, especially as the projects become more complicated and less guided towards the end.
There is a weekly quiz based word-for-word on Prof. Shin's textbook, and the questions read more like a tongue twister than any assessment of your comprehension, I found these really tedious but you should blitz through them in 15 minutes with only a question or two marked wrong.
The dreaded discussion posts are actually not too bad in this class, as they can be open-ended or based on some interesting videos and short articles.
An A is very achievable in this class, just stay on top of the week's workload by starting early in the week and asking classmates, the TA, and/or the Professor for help if you hit any road bumps.

as long as you turn in the work you're going to get an A
- weekly quizzes with unlimited attempts and no cooldown, every answer is directly from textbook (just open the textbook and ctrl+f)
- weekly discussion post gets full credit as long as it's 150 words and has a writing level of at least an 8th grader
- weekly assignments comes with ~30 min of walkthrough videos that you just have to follow along with to complete
- No exams!!!

overall it was cool learning about map making and GIS software, you'll get out what you put in.

easy class to cheese but also interesting to learn.

I love this class! This was probably the most fun class I've ever taken, the whole class was about making maps and manipulating them. It was super fun and one of the easiest GE's. The maps were occasionally time confusing but all the tutorials were on the class website. I would feel so accomplished every time I made a map. You don't really interact with the professor since most of the class is asynchronous based but if you need to take a GE, I would take this. The only time you would need to show up was for the labs and you would be able to finish most of your work for the week by then.

Really interesting class. Learn a whole hell of a lot. Just extremely time consuming, and frustrating at times. Liked the online format a lot, alongside the work at your pace. If plan on taking this class, I suggest you start assignments early, as troubleshooting the assignments take forever.

Overall, definitely a really cool class, would take again. Just know that going into it that it's a lot of work.

This class, especially for my quarter, has been entirely online. All lectures and assignments for each week are well-structured, which you will get used to them after the first few weeks. In my opinion, the lectures are short and concise, and the screencast for technical demonstrations are very helpful as step-by-step explanations, so you can keep up very easily. The deadline for this class is very strict, so you need to follow the deadlines for each week. This class takes around 10-12 hours (or sometimes up to 20 hours if the project is complicated) of your time a week to finish all the lectures, readings, and assignments. Even though the workload is a bit too much, you will learn a lot from this class. The projects each week have been interesting to me. The class content is neither too easy nor too hard; somewhat easy but somewhat challenging in some topics. In my quarter, the professor canceled the final project, so all the grades will depend on the past assignments. All the reading quizzes are unlimited attempts, so you can expect good scores from the reading quizzes portion. I personally have never been to any of the professor's office hours, but I have been to my TA's office hours and I think they are very supportive and helpful. Overall, I would recommend this class, but keep in mind that this is not the easiest GE class. I would not recommend anyone to take it for GE unless you are interested in this field or want to challenge yourself. You need to put the effort in, but you will also gain a lot as well.

Intro to GIS was an online class that included a weekly quiz, discussion and a weekly assignment. Quiz questions came from the online textbook and he weekly videos. Weekly assignments were interesting and their were several videos to help show you what to do and lead you in the right direction. This is a large online class and it really depends how your lab is for grading and help. I had lisa Martinez in an online setting and she was great. She was always willing to help and her grading was fair. This class has interesting and relevant content but it requires self motivation to stay on top.

PEDANTIC and unclear expectations.

You only get 20/20 on assignments if you go "Above and Beyond" but this is not defined. Classmates and I would make multiple additional maps for an assignment, add multiple extra layers and do extra analysis only to get DOCKED points because the TA "didn't like the colors used" ( there is no set criteria... its just whim of TA's).

Our TA Elizabeth Fard, constantly answers questions with "I don't know" and is very unhelpful. Shin takes days to answers questions.

I have never had a class that reprimands you for doing extra work, honestly, it's ridiculous.