As part of OpenTopography’s mission to democratize access to high resolution topography and advance our understanding of Earth’s surface, vegetation, and the built environment, we are dedicated to developing and supporting educational uses of topographic data. To evaluate OpenTopography’s educational impact, we assessed the diversity and breadth of educational institutions that use OpenTopography. OpenTopography’s educational resources, datasets, and processing tools are used by students and faculty at a wide variety of educational institutions, illustrating the broad impact of OpenTopography’s resources across many stages of education.
OpenTopography offers a suite of ready-to-use educational resources to facilitate the integration of high resolution topography into classroom lessons and activities at a variety of levels. In addition to using these resources, users from educational institutions can directly access data from OpenTopography for use both in the classroom and for scientific research in research publications. With easy-to-use on-demand processing tools, OpenTopography helps lower the barrier to entry for working with topographic data.
To measure the impact of OpenTopography’s educational resources, we tallied the number of educational institutions (not individual users) that have accessed data via OpenTopography and sorted these institutions based on their Carnegie Classification. The Carnegie Classification is a framework used to recognize and describe different types of institutions in U.S. higher education. The figure below shows the percentage use and count of educational institutions sorted by Carnegie Classification.
This analysis shows tens of thousands of individuals from across 735 different higher education institutions have accessed data from OpenTopography. The three most common institutional classes of OpenTopography users come from very high research activity doctoral institutions (R1), baccalaureate institutions (Bacc), and masters institutions (M1). Nearly 100 different associates and community colleges use OpenTopography to access topographic data.
Through OpenTopography’s cutting edge cyberinfrastructure, users across the full spectrum of institutions have direct access to high performance compute resources—resources that traditionally may not be available to non-R1 institutions. OpenTopography helps bring the power of supercomputers directly to the user, regardless of home institution resources, thereby enabling wide-ranging educational and research applications of topographic data.
Given that hundreds of institutions where OpenTopography users come from are non-doctorate granting institutions, we see that OpenTopography and topographic data are used across a broad educational user base. The diversity of institutions demonstrates the use of OpenTopography’s resources throughout the full spectrum of academic and workforce preparation.
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