E-Learning Everywhere with Podcasts - The CityGML Training Course for Mobile Devices

City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), an OpenGIS® Encoding Standard for the representation, storage and exchange of virtual 3D city and landscape models, has gained worldwide attraction in the GIS community. The format is supported by a variety of software vendors (Autodesk, Bentley, Safe Software - FME, Oracle etc.) and is adopted by many international cities, communities, and authorities (Abu Dhabi, Rotterdam, Zuerich, nearly all German cities, IGN France, 3D cadastre The Netherlands etc.). Hence the demand and need for training CityGML is requested by a variety of developers and users. For that purpose, training courses have been set up and are operated by the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science, Technische Universität Berlin (Germany). In this paper, we present the Internet based course on CityGML, which was initiated by the European Organization for Spatial Data Research (EuroSDR) and its derivate based on mobile devices. We place emphasis on the potential of mobile learning and demonstrate the workflow to create own podcasts for developing learning material on mobile devices. We discuss the three major technical aspects, which have to be considered in order to run a podcast successfully: choosing the appropriate movie format, writing optimal RSS-Feeds and publishing the podcast on adequate platforms. These aspects are important to make podcasts executable on as much as possible devices and to guarantee that the interested users will find proper podcasts. We discuss the setup of the CityGML mobile course and explain the difficulties, from technical perspective. Finally we focus on how to satisfy the major requirement to use existing classroom material such as PowerPoint presentations to get along with minimal time and effort.     «

City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), an OpenGIS® Encoding Standard for the representation, storage and exchange of virtual 3D city and landscape models, has gained worldwide attraction in the GIS community. The format is supported by a variety of software vendors (Autodesk, Bentley, Safe Software - FME, Oracle etc.) and is adopted by many international cities, communities, and authorities (Abu Dhabi, Rotterdam, Zuerich, nearly all German cities, IGN France, 3D cadastre The Netherlands etc.)...     »