How We Teach Tools for Open Geospatial Science at NCSU

Open science is much needed method to achieve more transparent and efficient research and its applications. The course we teach at North Carolina State University covers this emerging field of open science and deals with reproducibility and replicability challenges of geospatial research. The students gain a hands-on experience with tools used by scientists to conduct geospatial research which can be validated and applied by the wider geospatial community. Several geospatial open source tools are discussed in connection with general-purpose and text authoring tools such as interactive documents and revision control tools. Although the focus of the course is open science, many of the tools used in the course are used in industry, so that students pursuing various carriers can benefit from the course. The course further covers how open source communities and software development process work and how to apply this to research workflows in a lab group.