College of Science

Geospatial Resources

ArcGIS Online for Instructors

Need to include a geospatial component or focus in a course you are teaching? CSUMB's Education and Research ArcGIS Online (AGOL) organization can be used for sharing content, field data collection, running geospatial analyses, science communication via Story Maps, and a host of other applications. AGOL is also the primary way the ArcGIS Pro software is licensed, so if you plan to use ArcGIS Pro in your course, you and your students will need AGOL whether you use the portal directly or not. In addition, membership in our AGOL org enables access to ESRI's Online Academy for GIS Training.

All CSUMB students, staff, and faculty have access to AGOL, but the best way to use it in your curricula is to have a dedicated course-specific user group in our AGOL portal for each relevant course section. Having all students for a section in a group facilitates sharing and communication and gives you and your students a place to keep your work apart from that of other users (we have over 1000!).

Setting up group(s) for your course(s) can easily be accomplished by using this form, or sending a student roster for each course to gis@csumb.edu. The roster must include First Name, Last Name, OtterID, and email address.

If you have a way to generate the required student roster with all the required info then great! If not, you can use "New Analytics" in CANVAS to download a Report. If that does not work, there is an alternate method but unfortunately it requires more than just a few clicks. Follow the instructions below to get the needed info out of CANVAS if the "New Analytics" Report does not work:

Browse to your People page for your course. Edit the location (URL) at the top to 1) add /api/v1 before the /courses and 2) add ?per_page=100&include[]=email at the end. You can leave off the per_page if you have 10 or fewer students.

So it should look like this (without quotes):

"https://csumb.instructure.com/api/v1/courses/<your course number>/users?per_page=100&include[]=email"

When you press Enter, you'll (hopefully) get a line of JSON that will probably start with a while(1);


Select everything after the while(1); beginning with (and including) the left bracket [ and all the way through the ending right bracket ]. Do not include the while(1); in what you copy/paste.

 

Then copy that to the clipboard.


Go to a website that converts JSON into CSV (Excel). There are many available; here are a couple (no endorsement intended).

  • json-csv.com. Click on the Cog and choose Tab as a delimiter so you can copy/paste the results back. Otherwise you can download it as a CSV file and open that with a spreadsheet.
  • convertcsv.com. In step 1, choose option 3 to paste your data. In step 2, you can change the separator to a tab if you want to copy/paste, or leave it alone to download a file. In step 3, choose JSON to CSV to get it in a textbox you can copy/paste or choose JSON to Excel to download it directly.

 

These options will give you all of the information available, not just the fields you want, but then you can pick and choose what you want.