Felt

Felt proclaims it self to be "A better way to work with maps. Powerful enough for GIS Pros, easy enough for everyone else". Well, maybe.

• Felt seems like an online web mapping platform to accompany QGIS?
• Seems like they want to position themselves between the Nat Geo Map Maker (= no analysis) and ArcGIS Online.
• Not sure if I would be willing to put my work on a start-up like Felt that may disappear in a few years.

Open Pedagogy in GIS Education

Have a read: The next layer: Towards open pedagogy in geospatial education (Abernathy 2023). A few comments:

1. There's nothing inherently 'bad' about commerical GIS products (= Esri products) and there's nothing inherently 'better' about open-source GIS products - it's all in the way that you use them for teaching & learning.
2. GIS teaching & learning does not all of the sudden become 'active' or 'inquiry-based' or 'diverse' or 'participatory' when you use QGIS & an open-source book.
3. The vast majority of employees that hire my students use Esri products.
4. The biggest challanges for open-source GIS products: 1) there is no pratical solution for a Web GIS and 2) for GIS apps.
5. I will continue to use the Esri GIS products.

Lekan 2.2

Need to do some hydrological modeling? Try Lekan 2.2 (free, open-source, based on QGIS).

QGreenland

QGreenland is a free mapping tool to support interdisciplinary Greenland-focused research, teaching, decision making, and collaboration and combines key datasets into a unified, all-in-one GIS analysis and visualization environment for offline and online use.

Scientific Color Maps

When it comes to color (in maps, charts, etc.), ColorBrewer 2.0 has always been one of the go-to-resources. Now there's a new one: scientific color maps.

• The misuse of colour in science communication (Crameri et al. 2020)
• Scientific Colour Maps (website)
• Colour Maps (YouTube)

QGIS & GIS Cloud

QGIS is great and now has a plug-in to publish maps to GIS Cloud. That's great. But...also highlights one of the issues with QGIS: you need to pay a commercial business to host your web maps (unless you are willing and able to run your own GIS web servers).

Green Mountain Maps

Nothing really 'fancy' here, but Green Mountain Maps is a nice use of open-source data for a specific purpose (here tree skiing in Vermont).

QGIS 3 Beginner's Basic Tutorial

The QGIS 3 Beginner's Basic Tutorial is a nice and quick way to get to know QGIS.

FloodRisk

FloodRisk is a plugin for QGIS to quantify flood impacts and risks. Here are a few papers using FloodRisk:

• FloodRisk: a QGIS plugin for flood consequences estimation (Mancusi et al. 2015)
• FloodRisk: a collaborative, free and open-source software for flood risk analysis (Albano et al. 2017)
• Using FloodRisk GIS freeware for uncertainty analysis of direct economic flood damages in Italy (Albano et al. 2018)

The FOSS4G Academic Curriculum

Well, why not? The FOSS4G Academic Curriculum and associated open-source tools are great, but have one major flaw: the world is dominated by Esri products and therefore any responsible academic program has to include them in an appropriate way.

Mapping in QGIS

30 minutes = 1 Map. Nice.

A Journey of a Thousand Map Units Begins With a Single Dataset–GIS 101 is a nice introduction to GIS using QGIS.

Learn QGIS

Five free QGIS courses (self-taught at your own pace) - more information about the curriculum and content at the FOSS4G Geoacademy Curriculum.

Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide

In case you really need to know: Bivariate Choropleth Maps: A How-to Guide

QGIS Demo

Nothing fancy here, just a nice mapping demo using QGIS:

Science Mapping

Nature has a nice article by Mark Zastrow Data visualization: Science on the map as part of their Toolbox section featuring scientific software, app, and online tools. The focus is perhaps too much on TileMill and CartoDB, but still a worthwhile read.

QGIS

That's nothing new - QGIS is a very capable open-source alternative to Esri - actually, in practice, probably the only realistic way to avoid Esri products as MapWindow seems to be stalling these days.

• Full QGIS Training Manual (includes PostgreSQL and PostGIS) - also available in print.
• QGIS Uncovered (excellent 25-part video tutorial by Steven Bernard)

GIS and Geography MOOCs

Early 2015:

1. Geospatial MOOCs
2. Introduction to Geospatial Technology Using QGIS
3. Skills for the Digital Earth (Elmhurst College)

Upcoming:

1. Fundamentals of GIS for Conservation (6 modules from the Nature Conservancy)
2. Going Places with Spatial Analysis by Esri (upcoming, course outline).
3. Geospatial Intelligence & the Geospatial Revolution (starting 14 January 2015)
4. Introduction to GIS using gvSIG (24 November to 20 December 2014)

Starting now:

1. From GPS and Google Maps to Spatial Computing (started 23 September 2014)
2. Desktop GIS from Peggy Minnis at Pace University (started 1 September 2014, read syllabus here and enroll here)
3. Teaching Geography for the 21st Century (started 3 September 2014, more about this course from Joe Kerski) 
4. Introduction to GIS and Mapping by Open Online Education (started 1 September 2014)
5. GPS: An Introduction to Satellite Navigation, with an interactive Worldwide Laboratory using Smartphones by Stanford via Coursera (starts 13 October 2014).

Ongoing, finished, or closed:

1. Exploring Geographic Information Systems by Simon Fraser University. (Self-paced, but currently closed).
2. Introduction to Geospatial Technology using QGIS (and other open-source GIS courses under Academy Links, also great tutorials and labs on YouTube).
3. Maps and the Geospatial Revolution by PennState via Coursera (just finished).
4. Geodesign: Change Your World by PennState via Coursera (just finished.
5. Skills for the Digital Earth by Elmhurst College via Desire2Learn (just finished).

For a discussion of MOOCs, GIS, and Online Education in general consider "Crossing Borders" (a column by Doug Richardson in ArcNews Summer 2014).