So back last year I started something and have just finished one small part of it: https://training.northrivergeographic.com
The Intro to QGIS class has a new home and that new home has a lot of room for a lot of different things.
Something like 12 years ago (or more – 2013 to be exact) I started doing “online” training. At the time I was using a commercial platform and the theory was I could upload my class and record some content and you could offer training online. Except it never quite worked because no one could follow the slides unless I was standing there, I couldn’t make the content “work”, and my pricing was way off. After two months of earning negative income I cancelled the training.
With COVID, training morphed into an online offering. Honestly – It had it’s good points and it’s bad points. One good point: I reached a lot of people from all over the globe. The bad: People are all over the globe and just randomly planning a class didn’t work well.
Of course because of COVID, conference training picked up because you had everyone “in one place” whether that place was physical or digital. Since 2020 I’ve done a lot of training at conferences. The problem with that has been I’m down to three hours. At one point I had 4 hours. Originally it was 8 hours. Double Bonus for conference training is if 10 people registered I could have between 0 and 30 show up.
I had almost decided to “free the class” while I was in the hospital. The problem with that was how do I keep it up to date? I could by burning through a lot of unpaid time. Plus if I freed one class I’d free all of them. Time is a problem these days – there is never enough of it.
So what does this look like online training look like:
- It’s an introducton to QGIS and not an intro to GIS. So having some prior experience with GIS would be a good thing.
- Cost: $75 dollars US
- 8 chapters. You should be able to burn through it in 4ish hours.
- Certificate at the end
- I have ridiculously easy quizzes throughout. Plus data for the exercises.
So basically I rewrote the slides that I use in class. Which may sound easy but for me this was a bit harder than I wanted. I kept wanting to “skip” things I skip in class but everything needed to be spelled out. it’s hard to be subtle in writing.
Anyway – what next? Well – fixing this for QGIS 3.44 is next on the list. This will cover all the LTRs so I can keep this up for a year with minor adjustments. While I’m doing that my plan is to redo the model builder class in this format. Possibly do a QGIS/PostGIS class. Maybe even a GDAL class. As this hopefully makes money I renew support for QGIS International. Possibly Sponsor QGIS-US. Invest what I can into making this worthwhile for a bit.
Anyway – as with everything else we will see what happens next.
