Distance education at ITC: developing a Webcartography module using Blackboard and the Web

The International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) is facing the challenge of keeping its teaching programmes up-to-date, competitive and customer-oriented. ITC has stated in its ‘Strategic Plan 2001-2004’ that it intends to decentralise the educational programmes or parts thereof to certified partners in lesser developed countries. Part of this strategy entails developing distance education for specific programme components and therefore we need to build distance-learning facilities. As one of a the pilot projects a course on WebCartography with a large distance learning component has been developed. In its first implementation in 2001, an existing course was restructured making extensive use of distance learning techniques, using standard Web authoring techniques. In 2002 a second implementation was developed, using the Blackboard digital learning environment and the course was further developed towards a fully-fledged distance learning module. In the paper, we discuss the successes and problems of this process.