Challenging and stimulating.

A lot of assignments on Anthrax using real-world data.

Dr. Blackburn is an excellent professor and the Chair of the UF GIS department. The assignments, projects, and quizzes are not easy and require students to read and understand the assigned reading material. He is very understanding about late submissions, saying that he would rather see the students get the assignments correct than have them on time. I had several late assignments where he didn't penalize me. On the other side, he was slow in getting the assignments graded, with more than half of them graded during finals week. His grading was fair and generous, and he is obviously very gung-ho about the subject matter. He gave very detailed feedback and even sent me video explanations, which was very helpful and appreciated. He encourages the use of AI to research and facilitate gatheri...read more

Be ready to be challenged academically because this is a hard course for non GIS majors. If you have experience with ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, SatScan, Google Earth, and Geoda ... you'll be OK.