An E-learning Tutorial for Radar Remote Sensing with Rat

E-Learning materials and courses are becoming increasingly established at German universities. One reason for this is that technical prerequisites for successful e-learning – such as private internet access – have improved considerably. Furthermore, cost has been a driving force for the increase in online professional education. At the Technical University Berlin (TU Berlin), the Departments of Geodesy and Computer Vision are engaged in online education, offering a tutorial for remote sensing. The tutorial, which is divided into several chapters that are accompanied by exercises and tests, allows for performance linked control. User actions and test results are recorded in a personal data file. This information is used to adjust the exercises and to guide students through the course depending on their knowledge. Techniques for processing radar images are a main focus of the tutorial. Hands-on exercises covering SAR (synthetic aperture radar) topics are introduced as practical work to improve the students` understanding of remote sensing algorithms. For this purpose, test data of several study areas are available, and are employed to convey practical experience in the use of radar tools developed at the TU Berlin. Communication between the students happens by means of a forum, where ideas and problems are discussed and solved collaboratively. RAT (Radar Tools) is a collection of tools for processing SAR remote sensing data, developed at the TU Berlin for ongoing research and education. Students are encouraged to actively participate in software development, adding new functionality to the SARtoolbox. In practice, it has been observed that students are significantly more motivated when they realize that their work contributes to an ongoing, bigger project which is of general use. RAT is an ideal platform for experimentation and learning, as it is easy to extend and provides a convenient data handling framework. The development of RAT is motivated by the fact that modern remote sensing software systems like ERDAS IMAGINE or ENVI provide only basic SAR functionality. Advanced algorithms have to be implemented by each researcher independently. RAT aims to bring modern SAR algorithms to a wider user-base by simplifying the data handling and processing of complex SAR data. RAT can be run inside the free IDL virtual machine on various operating systems. * Corresponding author.