GEOGRAPHY STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION RELATED TO THE USE OF GIS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN GEOGRAPHIC HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Present-day geography is inconceivable in the absence of GIS software. The students and staff of the Faculty of Geography within the University of Bucharest use both proprietary GIS software and Open Source computer programmes. Consequently, this study aims at identifying to what extent each of them is used for various tasks and what is the students’ perception of the GIS Open Source tools. For this purpose, we applied an online questionnaire (with 16 items) to which 154 students from various years of study (undergraduate and master students) and from various study programmes responded willingly. Even though the results cannot be generalised, they prove to be useful due to the information they provide. The main issues addressed by the questionnaire items were the following: the experience in working with computer and GIS software, the daily average working time, the types of software students use at home and during their classes, the illegal use of proprietary software, what software students would choose, etc. We insisted on the reasons why students choose or reject the GIS Open Source software.

Keywords

• GIS Open Source software
• proprietary GIS software
• QGIS
• geography
• education