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David DiBiase directs the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He has led Penn State’s World Campus Certificate Program in GIS since its inception 1999, and is principal designer and manager of its online Master of GIS degree program. One of the authors of the GIS Certification Institute’s certification criteria, David now serves on GISCI’s Board of Directors. He chairs the education committee of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). David has earned awards for innovative teaching from Penn State, the Association of American Geographers, ESRI, and UCGIS.
David came to Penn State in 1989 after earning BS and MS degrees in Cartography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was hired to teach introductory and advanced cartography, and to direct the Department's George F. Deasy GeoGraphics Laboratory. In 1992, the Deasy Lab was invited to help design and produce a series of animated historical map essays for the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. The project launched David and the Lab into a new specialty: developing multimedia software for education. Over the next seven years the Lab created interactive products for students of physical geography, human geography, world regional geography, and geology.
Like many other university geography departments in the 1980s and 90s, Penn State required all its geography majors to pass an introductory cartography course. As the notion of Geographic Information Science took hold in the mid 1990s, David imagined a new kind of introductory course that would focus on the properties of geographic data, and on the technologies and institutions that produce and use it. In 1997, David began teaching Mapping Our Changing World, a comprehensive survey of fundamental concepts of GIS, cartography, remote sensing, and GPS in the context of social and environmental change. The course requires students to publish project reports on the World Wide Web, organized in online portfolios. Classroom and online versions of Mapping Our Changing World now attract hundreds of students each year from Penn State’s 24 campus locations.
In 1999, Penn State established an online Certificate Program in GIS. The Program serves adult professionals who use GIS, but who lack the formal education needed to use it most effectively. As faculty coordinator, David designed a sequence of four courses offered via the World Wide Web, through Penn State's online World Campus. Students earn a Certificate of Achievement from Penn State's Department of Geography after completing approximately 100 hours of activities led by a team of instructors. David teaches the first course in the sequence, called The Nature of Geographic Information. Understanding Geographic Data is the ESRI Virtual Campus edition of this course, which students may count toward the Penn State certificate.
David tries his best to manage all these activities without neglecting his most rewarding project of all—his marriage to fellow Penn State cartographer and author Cindy Brewer.
David's professional portfolio
On-line Certificate Program in GIS
GEOG 121: Mapping Our Changing World
Web Strategies Implementation Team
Contact David DiBiase by email.
DiBiase, D., DeMers, M., Johnson, A.B., Kemp, K.K., Plewe, B.P., Wentz, E.A., Eds. (2006). The Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.
Jocoy, C. and D. DiBiase (2006). Plagiarism by Adult Learners Online: A Case Study in Detection and Remediation. International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning, 7:1 http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/242/466
DiBiase, D. and H. Rademacher (2005). Scaling Up: How Increasing Enrollments Affect Faculty and Students in an Asynchronous Online Course in Geographic Information Science. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 29:1, 141-160.
DiBiase, D. (2004). The Impact of Increasing Enrollment on Faculty Workload and Student Satisfaction Over Time. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 8:1, 45-60. http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v8n2/pdf/v8n2_dibiase.pdf
DiBiase, D. (2003). On Accreditation and the Peer Review of Geographic Information Science Education. Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association 15:1, 7-14. http://www.urisa.org/Journal/protect/Vol15No1/Dibiase.pdf
DiBiase, D. (2000). Is Distance Teaching More Work or Less? American Journal of Distance Education 14:3, 6-20.
DiBiase, D. (2000). Is Distance Education a Faustian Bargain? Journal of Geography in Higher Education 24(1), 130–135.
