ArcGIS Online in Education

September 2013
ArcGIS Online
in Education
Success Stories from
Early Adopters

2
ArcGIS Online in Education—Success Stories from Early Adopters
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Table of Contents
3 Introduction
5 Introducing Geospatial Concepts to General
Education Students
8 Fostering New Pathways to GIS with ArcGIS
Online
11 Murray State University’s Training Modules Apply
ArcGIS Online to Business
15 Story Maps in the Classroom

3Introduction
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These stories serve as powerful testimony for how learning
with ArcGIS Online supports critical thinking, global awareness,
information competency, communication, and collaboration. The
stories describe innovative efforts of early adopters of ArcGIS
Online in higher education to empower their students to learn
in new ways. As Erich Fromm observed, “Creativity requires
the courage to let go of certainties.” These educators let go of
established practices to embrace the benefits of web GIS and
engage students from a wide variety of backgrounds in mapping
and spatial thinking.
These stories illustrate the diversity of learning with ArcGIS
Online by the variety of courses and programs they include.
ArcGIS Online supports Southwestern College’s earth science
curriculum, the University of Oregon’s new geography course,
Murray State University’s marketing and business curriculum, and
the University of South Carolina’s geography undergraduate
senior seminar. These stories further illustrate the diversity of the
students served by these institutions. As Ken Yanow explains,
Southwestern College’s student body is 81 percent ethnic
minorities. Christopher Bone’s students are just beginning their
university career, while Sarah Battersby’s students are finishing
theirs. Fred Miller’s students are not geography students at all
but rather in business marketing.
These stories demonstrate that ArcGIS Online serves a variety
of education objectives. Yanow’s goals were to embed critical
and holistic thinking and geotechnologies into earth science.
Battersby’s goals were to enable students to showcase their
capstone projects and communicate the results to community
partners. For Bone, ArcGIS Online was the perfect toolkit
to enable students in his Our Digital Earth class to use
geotechnologies effectively and easily. It enabled students from
disciplines as diverse as music, psychology, and journalism to
create maps and web applications. Miller’s students saw GIS as
another set of tools necessary in site selection and analyzing
business locations, consumer preferences, and advertising
campaigns.
These stories also illustrate that ArcGIS Online supports an
amazing variety of projects: comparing winemaking in San Diego
County, California, with Tuscany, Italy; examining food deserts
in Oregon; analyzing market segments and business locations
in Ohio; studying the Gills Creek Watershed in South Carolina;
Introduction
Joseph J. Kerski, Esri Education Manager

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4Introduction
and simulating a cholera outbreak on the University of Oregon
campus.
Finally, these stories illustrate Edwin Land’s statement that “the
essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Bone’s
cholera simulation could have fallen flat, for example. Yet these
educators forged ahead and succeeded. They not only used
new methods but created new courses and programs, which in
itself requires much tenacity in higher education. And they built
bridges between disciplines and encouraged students to study
issues from multiple perspectives.
As Bone indicates, ArcGIS Online is “fostering new pathways.”
Key to these pathways are innovative educators and their
students who are unafraid to blaze new paths.

5Introducing Geospatial Concepts to General Education Students
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Introducing Geospatial Concepts to General Education Students
Earth Science Now More Engaging with ArcGIS Explorer Online
By Ken Yanow, Professor of Geographical Sciences, Southwestern College
Southwestern College (SWC) in Chula Vista, California, is so
named because it is located in the southwestern corner of the
continental United States—12 miles south of the city of San Diego
and 8 miles north of the US-Mexico international border. The
college serves approximately 400,000 residents within the district,
which encompasses the communities of the southern urban
section of San Diego County. The total annual enrollment at SWC
is around 30,000 students, and the average student is 25 years
old. Eighty-one percent of all SWC students are ethnic minorities,
with Hispanics comprising 56 percent of the student body. SWC
is listed as a Hispanic Serving Institution.
In 2012, the college was selected as an Esri ArcGIS Online for
Education grant winner. As a result of the grant, two new ArcGIS
Online projects have been created and are now incorporated
into all the college’s earth science general education courses,
including Physical Geography, Geography of California, Cultural
Geography, World Regional Geography, Weather and Climate,
and Introduction to Earth Science. These are the college’s most
popular general education courses, with nearly 2,000 students
enrolled annually.
Although the popularity of SWC’s earth science courses can be
attributed to a number of reasons, perhaps the most important
part of their success is that earth science coursework is contextual
and relevant in today’s geospatially connected world. With
the advent of online mapping and location-specific computer
applications, geospatial technologies and geography itself are
more familiar to the general public, while geospatial disciplines
are becoming more and more popular among college students.
With this in mind, the new ArcGIS Online assignments are a
perfect fit for SWC’s earth science courses, providing an easy-to-
Locations of vineyards around the world (ArcGIS Explorer Online).

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use, robust tool for students not only to learn earth science but
also to develop and strengthen their geographic awareness and
spatial thinking skills.
The projects were developed with the following educational
objectives in mind:
• Critical thinking and spatial reasoning skill set development
• Information competency enhancement (that is, how
information technology is used in environmental and social
issues)
• Expanded global awareness (how the world is similar/
dissimilar in culture, politics, and environment)
• Comprehension of fundamental GIS concepts
Each project is self-contained and includes step-by-step
instructions to help the students explore the related data and
perform a series of exercises. Beyond ArcGIS Explorer Online
and the layers of data that can be directly added to maps from
the ArcGIS Online data warehouse, no additional software or
data is required. The projects take two to four hours to complete.
Visualizing the SWC Student Community—Examining address
and demographic data with ArcGIS Explorer Online, students
gain fundamental insight into the economic and sociological
characteristics of their college. Using the standard postal code
data from the United States Postal Service and the SWC student
admissions data, a database was created of the locations
where SWC students lived from 2007 to 2011. This included
another data layer containing demographic information with
the socioeconomic breakdown and ethnicities for each postal
code. Exercises include statistical analyses of student residence
locations, the examination of income levels and ethnicity,
proximity to fault zones, location/climate characteristics, and the
location of local transportation corridors.
Comparing and Contrasting Wine-Making Regions in Tuscany
and San Diego County—In this module, students explore the
variables of wine making, paying special attention to soil, climate,
Example of vine spacing, density measurement (ArcGIS Explorer Online).

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and topographic characteristics. A shapefile map was created
that includes the majority of vineyards in the world. By clicking
the dot representing a vineyard, information about it is displayed.
Students map the location of vineyards in Tuscany, Italy, and San
Diego County and overlay those locations with climate, soil, and
geologic data. Then, the two wine-making regions are compared.
Students not only analyze environmental data but also use ArcGIS
Explorer Online to discern more specialized information, such as
the measurement of vine density.
During the fall 2012 semester, the projects were beta tested
by approximately 200 students enrolled in selected Physical
Geography and Introduction to Earth Science classes. Both
projects were extremely well received. Typical responses
included, “Wow, I didn’t know that!” and “Oh, that makes sense.”
Anecdotally, beta testers did better on those portions of the
class exams that included geospatial technologies, demographic
analysis, and natural vegetation topics by about 5 percentage
points over other members in their respective classes. Although
there are other variables to consider, it is a reasonable conclusion
that the ArcGIS Explorer Online projects aided in student success.
Ultimately, those are the desired outcomes—students becoming
engaged in a project, enjoying the learning process, and actually
learning.
Both these projects are included in spring 2013 SWC earth
science classes. In addition, the projects were sent to all SWC
instructors so that they could incorporate them into their own
disciplines, where possible. Presently, requests are coming in
from instructors across a variety of disciplines to help build
additional learning modules. With that in mind, the following
projects are currently being worked on: Erik the Red and the
Norse Greenland Tragedy—What Happened and Why? and The
Spread of Humans Around the World, based on part I of the book
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. ArcGIS Online across
the campus of Southwestern College is helping to promote
interactive learning, geographic awareness, and spatial thinking
to thousands of general education students each year.
About the Author
Ken Yanow, professor of geographical sciences at Southwestern
College in Chula Vista, California, has master’s degrees in both
geography and astronomy. He leads the GeoTech Center’s
efforts to promote minority and female recruitment in geospatial
technology programs nationwide.
(This article originally appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of ArcNews Online.)

8Fostering New Pathways to GIS with ArcGIS Online
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In the summer of 1854, the Soho neighborhood in the city of
London, England, was gripped by a cholera outbreak that was
killing an increasing number of Londoners each day. By the end
of the outbreak, 616 people had died. However, this number
could have been much higher if it were not for the insight and
actions of Dr. John Snow, who utilized spatial analysis with a
simple map to determine that a single water pump was the
source of the outbreak. Snow eventually became known as
the “father” of modern-day epidemiology, and the world was
introduced to the power of spatial analysis. While this was a
watershed moment in many ways, we have to wonder how this
outbreak would be different if it were to occur today. One thing
for certain is that web-based mapping and social media would
play a significant role in helping minimize the impacts of this crisis.
How?
That question was answered in the fall of 2012 in the Department
of Geography at the University of Oregon in a course called Our
Digital Earth, and ArcGIS Online was the core resource that made
it all possible.
Our Digital Earth is a new freshman course that was awarded
Esri’s ArcGIS Online for Educators grant for developing a course
that uses ArcGIS Online in a way that facilitates an introduction
to the world of geospatial data and technology for non-GIS
students. Over the course of 10 weeks, students received the
following message:
Every day of your life, you make several decisions that are based
on geography. Using your smartphone, you inquire where is the
best place to have lunch with friends and how is the best way to
get to the restaurant. On your laptop, you roam the earth to see
where your relatives live and observe photos of those locations
Fostering New Pathways to GIS with ArcGIS Online
By Christopher Bone, Assistant Professor, Department
of Geography, University of Oregon
Campus map demonstrating the location of Tweets that were posted by
course staff who were simulating students infected with cholera.

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that others have taken. You receive texts from people you don’t
know who are explaining where a social event is happening
tonight. Every day of your life, you are interacting with geospatial
data and technologies but are perhaps unaware of how important
they are in our world.
Unlike typical GIS classes that are offered as upper-division
courses to students with some formal geography or
computational training, the goal of Our Digital Earth is to
invite students across all disciplines to examine how geospatial
data is collected and used, how geospatial technologies have
transformed the way we think and make decisions, and the
important societal issues that result. ArcGIS Online provides
us with an opportunity to have a broad range of students learn
how to develop web-based mapping applications by integrating
satellite imagery with their own data they collected in the field
or from the web. The mapping applications are created as part
of a set of assignments that include everything from mapping
students’ routes to campus with spatial features and social
media to creating web-based applications that shed light on
socioeconomic inequalities in major cities. Of these assignments,
the one that students were most excited with this term was
learning how to engage in a crowdsourcing activity to respond to
disasters, such as a cholera outbreak.
Over two weeks in November, our class set out to simulate a
modern-day version of the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak on
the campus of the University of Oregon. However, instead of
sketching out cholera deaths on a paper map, students utilized
e-mail alerts, posts on a dedicated Facebook page, and Twitter
messages that collectively provided information on the types
of individuals who were infected each day; their daily activity
patterns, including walking paths and courses in which they were
enrolled; the locations of water sources around campus; and
the status of water testing at potentially infected sites. In small
groups, students were responsible for assigning individual tasks
among themselves to efficiently map out the diverse range of
information that they received on a daily basis. Students created
maps in ArcGIS Online, shared the maps among group members,
collectively mapped out the cholera-related information, and
performed a visualization of all the data to determine where the
cholera outbreak originated.
Most impressive in this assignment was that students could easily
map Tweets by utilizing one of the ArcGIS Online social media
mapping applications. Students simply entered in keywords, and
the Tweets posted by the teaching staff were placed on the map
in the location from where the Tweet was posted. For example, if
I were to Tweet from outside a residence on campus that I had
been infected with cholera, a student could search the keyword
cholera and a feature would be placed in the location from where
I posted the message. The response from this assignment was
unanimously enthusiastic, and ArcGIS Online made it all possible.
As someone who teaches multiple GIS-related courses, I was
impressed at how students from all disciplines (e.g., geography,

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music, psychology, journalism) could easily create not just maps
but web-based mapping applications. One example was a
mapping application that demonstrated the potential presence
of food deserts in Portland, Oregon. Students with little to no
GIS experience were able to create an application in which three
separate maps representing socioeconomic data and grocery
store locations zoom and pan in unison, which were accompanied
by text describing the relationship between quality of life and
access to major grocery stores.
From an administrative perspective, ArcGIS Online provided a
means for students to store data and projects without having
them rely on desktop software in a lab. That means that students
can access their work from anywhere in the world! Also, having
students be able to share their projects with the public provided
an added sense of pride in their work and was extremely helpful
in advertising the course to the university community and beyond.
As Our Digital Earth wraps up this term, we are very excited
about future offerings of this course and the role in which ArcGIS
Online will help it grow into an integral part of the geography
curriculum. Without a doubt, we have already engaged a new
group of GIS professionals that would have likely not discovered
this discipline through traditional means. Dr. John Snow would
surely be impressed!
About the Author
Christopher Bone, assistant professor in the Department of
Geography at the University of Oregon, received his PhD from
Simon Fraser University in Canada. His work is focused on
modeling coupled human-natural systems, with specific attention
paid to large-scale forest disturbances.
(This article originally appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of ArcNews Online.)
Web-based mapping application demonstrating location of major
grocery stores in Portland, Oregon (left) in relationship to unemployment
(center) and net worth (right).

11Murray State University’s Training Modules Apply ArcGIS Online to Business
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GIS has proved its value in the analysis and solution of business
problems over and over, especially in marketing analyses.
However, the adoption and dissemination of GIS tools among
executives and marketing managers has been painstakingly slow
because a lack of knowledge about its capabilities. So too has
been the integration of GIS tools into the curricula of business
schools, where instruction in this technology lags far behind its
potential contribution to the business decision-making process.
To date, this is largely the result of the steep resource curve of
GIS systems (hardware, software, faculty training, and so on)
that are generally not included in business school budgets. In
addition, the traditional GIS lab model requires a significant
commitment of institutional and personal resources to develop
GIS learning activities that must be subsequently crammed into
an already tightly packed course.
Business GIS Training Modules
Easy-to-understand, structured, online GIS instruction can
minimize equipment, training, and administrative cost, while
supporting classroom instruction. At Kentucky’s Murray State
University (MSU), a project team of nine marketing and one
accounting faculty members developed RacerGISOnline, a series
of online business GIS training modules. RacerGISOnline.org,
Murray State University’s funded project in the Esri ArcGIS Online
for Education grant program, can be taught by faculty with
relatively little GIS background.
Murray State University’s Training Modules Apply ArcGIS Online to Business
RacerGISOnline Is Based on Esri Press SpatiaLABS
By Fred L. Miller, PhD, Murray State University, Kentucky
RacerGISOnline home page.

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The program provides enhanced training for seven lab courses
from the business section of SpatiaLABS, available from Esri
Press. SpatiaLABS are computer-based exercises that supplement
college curriculum and present students with a variety of real-
world problems that they solve using GIS technology. The
MSU program allows students to work through the designated
SpatiaLABS exercises using ArcGIS Online, which is seamlessly
accessed through RacerGISOnline. A video supplements each
exercise, providing additional support without the need for
classroom instruction. The video tutorials for these exercises are
collected in a YouTube playlist for ease of discovery and access
by interested students and faculty. That playlist also includes a
general overview tutorial to help students and faculty learn basic
functions of ArcGIS Online. The description for each tutorial
provides instructions on how to access the relevant map and
written instructions in the corresponding exercises in SpatiaLABS.
Each module in the series can be finished in 75 minutes or less
and used as in-class activities or independent exercises. They
may be completed as individual assignments or in teams of two
students working on two computers, one computer displaying a
SpatiaLABS activity and its instructions and the other computer
with the map and its resources. As all exercises are web-based,
no computer lab facilities are required.
At the conclusion of each module, students are directed to
an online survey so that they can evaluate the exercise and its
technical components. They also discuss the value of the exercise
in class, as well as their level of interest in completing additional
modules or taking a business GIS course. More than 50 percent
of business students who complete a RacerGISOnline module
have expressed interest in taking a dedicated business GIS
course.
These modules fill different roles in the MSU geography,
marketing, and accounting curricula. As they are illustrative
RacerGISOnline modules YouTube playlist.

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applications, geography students will not necessarily expand their
GIS skills, but they will see how those skills may be applied to
the analysis of business problems. For marketing and accounting
students, these modules will often be their first hands-on
experience with GIS tools and the application of geospatial
thinking to business problems. Because marketing students
at MSU have the opportunity to work with geospatial tools in
several different courses in their curriculum, the completion of
RacerGISOnline modules provide them with a good introduction
to the GIS tools they may encounter in other classes. They also
become prime candidates for a dedicated business GIS course
offered either by the MSU business school or the geography
department.
Following accreditation trends, most business schools and
their faculty are seeking opportunities to integrate technology-
based, innovative, interactive, hands-on learning activities into
business courses. Many of them are high enrollment courses with
relatively little opportunity for large scale lab activities. These
modules are very useful in that setting, particularly in marketing
courses. In addition, by introducing their marketing colleagues to
RacerGISOnline business GIS modules and providing support for
course integration, geography faculty can build demand for their
own business geography courses.
Further expansion of the system and its learning resources will
include the involvement of faculty in other MSU colleges and
schools.
About the Author
Fred L. Miller is Thomas Hutchens Distinguished Professor of
Marketing and Business GIS in the Department of Management,
Marketing and Business Administration at Murray State University,
Murray, Kentucky. He is also director of MSU’s Regensburg
Exchange Programs. His teaching and research interests are in
the fields of business GIS, e-commerce, emerging technologies
in marketing and global marketing management. Miller authored
the books GIS Tutorial for Marketing (Esri Press, 2007) and
Sample business GIS module map.

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Getting to Know Esri Business Analyst (Esri Press, 2011), and is a
contributing author to SpatiaLABS.
(This article originally appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of ArcNews Online.)

15Story Maps in the Classroom
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Incorporating Esri’s story maps into the geography
undergraduate senior seminar at the University of South Carolina
helped students communicate results from their semester-long
projects. The authors discuss the successes they had and the
challenges they faced to help other instructors recognize the
possibilities—and minimize the limitations—of using story maps
in their own classrooms.
The story map concept allowed students with varying levels of
GIS and mapping experience (from none to substantial) to clearly
express the spatial story attached to their projects. Story maps
let educators introduce students to the concepts and techniques
involved with creating a dynamic, geocentric web application.
Story maps can be created using basic prepared templates that
are designed entirely using the ArcGIS Online web application
tools or from downloadable template files that can be easily
configured and customized by editing a few simple HTML or
comma-separated value (CSV) files. While the incorporation of
story maps was an overall success, it was a learning experience
with technical challenges for students, the instructor, and the
technical staff supporting the class.
About the Class and Projects
As part of graduation requirements, geography majors at
the University of South Carolina must complete a semester-
long, capstone project. Students, who enroll in a seminar class
during their last year in the major, enter that class with varied
backgrounds in geography that typically emphasize GIScience,
human, or physical geography. Consequently, students are
encouraged to tackle projects that use multidisciplinary
approaches. In addition, no common level of experience in
mapping or the use of geospatial technologies can be assumed.
The class is typically structured to partner a group of students
(from a few students to the entire class) with local community
agencies that have interesting spatial problems. Efforts are made
to match agency work with students’ expertise across major and
other university coursework.
Given these constraints, Esri’s story maps and ArcGIS Online
were chosen to enable all students to feel comfortable preparing
attractive, informative maps and spatially referenced media
to communicate their results and meet the objectives of their
partner organization.
Story Maps in the Classroom
By Sarah E. Battersby and Kevin C. Remington, University of South Carolina

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For the fall 2012 semester, six groups of students were working
on projects with three local agencies: the Gills Creek Watershed
Association, Lexington County GIS, and Sustainable Midlands.
Prior to the start of the semester, potential projects and how a
story map or set of story maps developed as part of the class
projects might be of benefit to the agencies were discussed. The
agencies expressed interest in story maps as student-generated
deliverables for projects. The story map format was viewed as an
innovative, web-based way to help agencies explore their data,
use it for internal organizational purposes, and communicate to
the public about issues of interest.
Implementation Process
While all students in the class were seniors in their last year of
coursework for the geography major, only about a third of them
had worked with Esri’s desktop or online GIS products. Most had
no experience in map design. Because the class focus was on
the projects and content, there was limited time to dedicate to
learning geospatial technologies and cartographic practices.
To get the students familiar with ArcGIS Online and story maps,
one of the authors, Kevin Remington, the campus GIS coordinator,
presented a lecture on the basics of ArcGIS Online. The other
author, course instructor Sarah Battersby, presented two
additional follow-up lectures on customizing the HTML-based
templates and creating maps using the ArcGIS Online hosted
templates. In total, approximately four hours of class lecture
time was dedicated to introducing the basics of story mapping.
Throughout the remainder of the semester, the instructor and two
GIS staff members assisted students in collecting and analyzing
content and preparing data to make their story maps. To aid
them in building and displaying their maps, students were given
department-hosted web accounts, and each student created an
ArcGIS Online account.
Five of the six project groups presented their project results
using story maps. The group that did not create a story map
used data that could not be distributed publicly due to privacy
concerns from the partner agency.
Student Responses
Four of the 19 students enrolled in the course were interviewed
about their experiences with story maps. These students were
from different project groups and had varied backgrounds (i.e.,
not all GIS-focused).
Overall, their responses to the use of story maps for
communicating their final project results were positive. They
found story map templates easy to use, enabling them to
design more exciting, interactive web-based maps than would
have been possible with other technologies available to
them. Students easily designed custom pop-ups with tables,
photographs, and charts. The students also emphasized that

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ArcGIS Online and story maps were accessible to everyone in the
class.
While the more experienced students had an initial advantage,
most students quickly grasped the concepts and discovered that
they didn’t need to have that background to make a great map.
This allowed for greater division of labor across the groups and
emphasized that mapping “isn’t just for the GIScience majors.”
The partner agencies seemed to agree the projects were
successful. A class-developed virtual tour of the Gills Creek
Watershed was posted on the Gills Creek Watershed Alliance
website, and additional maps are being posted by Lexington
County to show the physical, cultural, and historical landmarks of
the Riverwalk, part of the Three Rivers Greenway network of trails
and parks.
While the students incorporated several different types of story
maps into their projects, the Storytelling Map Tour template was
the most popular. This template combines an interactive map, a
photo panel with customizable descriptive text, and a carousel
of photo thumbnails. The map template includes two different
colors of map markers and is customized by simply editing the
CSV file that lists the location where markers should be placed on
the map that correspond to photos of each location. Additional
customization of the basemap, level of zoom, and title can be
done by editing a simple HTML file.
Challenges
The free Esri story map customizable templates and
complementary hosting service using ArcGIS Online alleviate a
number of instructional, IT, and administrative considerations.
However, implementing these tools created some new challenges.
Students could supplement story maps data they produced
as part of their project with map and feature services already
published by Esri and hosted on ArcGIS Online. Often, students
needed datasets that were specific to the class project. These
students had to create their own services. While the students’
The Storytelling Map Tour template, an interactive map and a photo panel
with customizable descriptive text, was the most popular.

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personal ArcGIS Online accounts were sufficient in many
instances, projects that required working with larger datasets
quickly exceeded the ArcGIS Online personal account limit for
importing files of 1,000 features or 250 geocoded addresses.
To work around this, large layers were broken into many smaller
layers and then symbolized individually—a challenge without
manual classification options in ArcGIS Online. Alternatively,
access to the data was made possible via map or feature services
hosted on site at the university as an ArcGIS for Server instance.
While working with the story map templates and ArcGIS Online,
the authors began exploring the ArcGIS Online for Organizations
account that had just been provided to the university through its
site license agreement. With this additional functionality, student-
authored maps and feature services could be hosted on Esri’s
cloud. These resources then become simple for the students
to consume in their story maps. While the ArcGIS Online cloud
provided a number of exciting new opportunities for helping
the students present more complex datasets, it also introduced
some general considerations for its successful employment in an
academic environment.
One concern was the ArcGIS Online credits expended by the use
of this cloud-based technology in the classroom. The site license
agreement provided an initial allotment of credits. The authors
assessed the feasibility of using institutional credits to host
datasets for class projects to determine how far credits might go
given expected use. Credits are generally spent for bandwidth,
computation, and storage. With many class projects, the
bandwidth usage cost is of little concern because the audience is
often just the students in the classroom and the instructors.
Of greater concern, however, is the expenditure of credits
for computation and storage. Although many student-built
applications consume fairly small proof-of-concept datasets, this
is not always the case for class projects when partnering with
state- or county-level public organizations to address problems
and provide real-world applications. For these projects, a student
might build an application that exposes a large number of
spatially discrete geographic units such as parcel and building
footprint data. In this scenario, the project would require many
gigabytes of data storage in the ArcGIS Online cloud and
consume a large number of credits.
In one class project, a student could consume approximately
800 credits to publish and store a feature service that exposed
approximately 1 GB of data. This scenario meant that, for a class
of 15 to 25 students, the entire university allotment of credits
could be expended in a single lab session.
Of course, storing feature data in the ArcGIS Online cloud
and exposing it through feature services is more costly than
storing data as a tiled map service. A tiled service provides a
good alternative when much of the data that a student needs
to expose can be utilized as view-only data. However, even this
approach can be costly if the student needs to expose large

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areas of high-resolution imagery and raster data that may require
tiling at many different scales for optimal performance. This
approach can become costly because organizations are charged
credits for the computation involved in generating the tiles on
ArcGIS Online and for their storage.
The authors’ experience indicates that using story maps requires
active administration of an ArcGIS Online site. The site should be
routinely cleaned to remove redundant or orphaned services and
applications that are no longer needed. IT staff need to evaluate
which approach (feature service or tile cache-based service) is
best, in the long run, for distributing the data.
Other administrative concerns include the necessity of associating
each student’s Esri Global Account with the university’s ArcGIS
Online group. While this is a fairly straightforward process, care
needs to be taken when assigning rights to a group member and
ensuring membership is terminated when the class ends or the
student leaves the university.
Conclusion
Even with these challenges, working with ArcGIS Online and
story maps provided great opportunities to introduce students
to web-based mapping and multimedia technologies. The story
map concept enabled students with all levels of GIS experience
to create professional-looking dynamic web map applications to
support and present the research from their class projects. There
were definite learning moments for everyone involved in these
projects. Creativity was needed to work around the limitations of
ArcGIS Online (which can’t be expected to have the functionality
of ArcGIS for Desktop). However, ArcGIS Online and story maps
made high-quality mapping accessible to all students.
About the Authors
Sarah E. Battersby, PhD, is an assistant professor in the
geography department at the University of South Carolina.
Her research interests include cognitive issues in GIScience
and geography education. She currently serves on the board
of directors for the Cartography and Geographic Information
Society (CaGIS) and the University Consortium for Geographic
Information Science (UCGIS).
Kevin C. Remington, GISP, has been the campus GIS coordinator
at the University of South Carolina for the last 15 years. His
interdisciplinary role keeps him involved in many of the
university’s research, teaching, and outreach activities that have
a GIScience component. When not immersed in the world of
GIS and academia, he can be found homesteading, enjoying
the outdoors, traveling, tasting craft beers, playing music, and
building yurts.
(This article originally appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of ArcUser.)

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