Esri Coursebooks Go Digital

Printed Workbooks Shelved in Favor of Digital Versions with Color Maps and Other Materials

By Suzanne Boden
Esri Training Services

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Esri Training continues its digital transformation with a new initiative: starting this month, students will receive only digital workbooks in Esri training center classes.

Gone are the printed coursebooks that Esri has supplied over the last 30 years for students who attend traditional instructor-led classes. Digital workbooks offer several benefits over print versions including the following:

• Color—For years, one of the enhancements most frequently requested by students has been to replace black-and-white coursebooks with color books. When you work with maps, you want to see them in color, of course. However, producing thousands of printed color coursebooks every year is expensive. With digital books, Esri Training can finally provide the color materials that many of you have wanted for years.
• Productivity tools—Printed books are wonderful to hold and flip through, but digital books have great features too. For example, you can use provided bookmarks to jump directly to lesson pages, and you can quickly search the content for specific words and phrases. You can also highlight text and add digital notes. That makes it easy to find the information you need after class when you're trying to remember the steps to complete an ArcGIS task or workflow.

• Up-to-date materials—In the past, Esri software releases occurred every couple of years. Today, releases happen quarterly. This cycle is great for providing new and improved functionality to Esri's customers, but it makes keeping training materials up-to-date very challenging. With digital books, Esri will be able to update content much faster.

• Reduced environmental footprint—As a company committed to sustainability and smart planning, Esri feels a responsibility to conserve resources wherever possible. Digital books significantly reduce paper use and the energy and chemicals required by the printing process. Digital books also eliminate the fuel usage associated with shipping printed books to each Esri training location.
• Cost savings—Recognizing that many organizations have limited training budgets, Esri strives to offer affordable, competitively priced products. Adopting digital coursebooks will produce savings that will help keep the cost of instructor-led training as low as possible.

Digital coursebooks provide rich color and convenient tools for students in Esri instructor-led classes.

There are more than 400 e-Learning resources in the Esri Training catalog.

Esri training center classrooms will feature dual-monitor workstations for each student.

Digital coursebooks are the latest in a long line of digital moves for Esri Training. In 1997, Esri launched Esri Virtual Campus, one of the first commercial websites devoted to teaching GIS topics and technology on the web. Web courses were a relatively new phenomenon in the late 1990s but quickly gained a following, especially in the higher education community.

Virtual Campus web courses were so popular that Esri decided to virtualize the in-person seminar experience. In 2001, live training seminars were launched. These are hour-long, free, online seminars on technical topics. Those also proved to be—and remain—popular.

The instructor-led online classroom was introduced in 2004. Shortly afterward, the Great Recession hit, and many GIS professionals found themselves grounded, unable to travel to attend a training class. For several years, the online classroom was the only viable option for many Esri customers to attend instructor-led training. Today, the online classroom is just as popular as Esri's traditional classrooms.

In 2016, the Esri Training website was redesigned, doubling the size of the e-Learning collection to include new formats and durations.

So digital is already a huge part of what Esri does. Plus, online classroom students have always received digital course workbooks. Their feedback has helped us understand which digital features are most valuable, both during class and afterward, back at the office.

The Digital Dimension

To ensure that students continue to have an excellent classroom experience, Esri is adding a second monitor to each classroom workspace. Students will view the digital coursebook on one monitor while following the course presentation and interacting with Esri software on the other monitor.

At the beginning of class, students will download the digital coursebook from the Training website and annotate it as desired throughout the class. At the end of class, students will upload their annotated coursebooks to the Training website. Back at the office, the coursebook can be downloaded to a local drive and easily referenced at any time.