Redlands, California— February 28, 2012—Esri has awarded five grants to select university and college faculty members to create exemplary higher education course materials and implementations of ArcGIS Online. Grantees receive $10,000 (US) each, as well as assistance from curriculum development specialists on Esri's education solutions team.

ArcGIS Online is a cloud-based geospatial platform that enables individuals to create and share maps, apps, and map services. Later this year, Esri will introduce new features to ArcGIS Online, providing enhanced mapping and data sharing capabilities to support collaboration within an organization. Esri will include ArcGIS Online subscriptions in its educational site licenses at no extra cost.

"Our goal is to help early adopters demonstrate the potential of the ArcGIS Online platform to support spatial thinking and learning across the curriculum," says David DiBiase, director of Esri's education solutions team. "We believe this new platform will enable hundreds of thousands more students worldwide to experience the power of GIS." 

The grant winners and their projects are as follows:

• Mark Lindberg, Len Kne, and their colleagues at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN) will evaluate how the software can be used to support teaching, research, and enterprise services across a large land grant university.

• Dr. Fred L. Miller and colleagues at Murray State University (Murray, KY) will develop and deploy business GIS exercises for marketing majors.

• Dr. Christopher Bone at the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR) will use the software as a platform for a new introductory course, entitled Our Digital Earth, to expose students to the geospatial data and technologies found in their daily lives.

• Ken Yanow at Southwestern College (Chula Vista, CA) will create a series of assignments for a suite of general education courses that will enroll a diverse population of 2,000 students per year.

• Dr. Eui-kyung Shin at Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL) will develop geographic curriculum materials that enhance spatial thinking and active learning for elementary preservice teachers.

Grantees will present their preliminary results during the 2012 Esri Education GIS Conference in San Diego, California, and implement them on campus during the 2012–13 academic year.

About Esri

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide, including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at esri.com/news.

Esri, the Esri globe logo, GIS by Esri, ArcGIS, esri.com, and @esri.com are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of Esri in the United States, the European Community, or certain other jurisdictions. Other companies and products mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective trademark owners.  

Press Information

Contact: Jim Baumann, Esri  

Tel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-1807

E-mail: Email Contact