Rural communities are hungry for decision-making and collaboration tools, but may lack access to traditional GIS services. Likewise early career professionals may not have authority to make desktop GIS license decisions. Fortunately, cloud technology can be leveraged for geodesign projects. Launching an online geodesign methods course built on processes framed by Steinitz and others led me to implement an experiment: Can the Geodesign Framework be translated and taught entirely with Esri Web GIS technology? An opportunity for the class to work on a rural community planning project presented a perfect use case for my experiment. The upper level course concurrently matches the framework process (Steinitz 2012) with accompanying hands-on practice using Web GIS (Fu 2018). We started with web maps, story maps, and mobile apps for representation models. Then students built web apps with geoprocessing and dashboards for process and evaluation models. Next they built on those skills to model rural housing density scenarios applying GeoPlanner for ArcGIS and green infrastructure in change models with performance metrics for impact models. Finally they combined these with 3D visualizations for decision modeling and presentations to the town board. To be able to complete a geodesign process in Web GIS offers a novel model for future projects with limited desktop resources.
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