Surveyors Professional Society Acts to Add Online Education as a Member Benefit
August 6, 2015 – Andover, Kan. & Kansas City, Mo. – The Kansas Society of Land Surveyors (KSLS), a society of surveying professionals licensed by the state of Kansas, announces a plan to provide quality, relevant and media-rich online continuing education not only to its members but all those who are working in surveying in Kansas. This initiative is launched through collaboration with GeoLearn, a company focused on serving the geospatial industry with video-based online learning and continuing education credits. The portal is immediately available on the KSLS website by clicking on GeoLearn under the Education tab.
Ernie Cantu, President of KSLS said that "The creation of this online learning portal for Kansas surveyors is part of the society’s plan to be more relevant to its members in today’s web-based world, and to provide richer, more diverse content on a 24/7 basis anywhere an Internet connection is available."
Wil Anderson, Chairman of the KSLS Charitable Foundation added, "One of the benefits of this partnership is that a portion of the proceeds from fees paid by online portal participants will go to the
Charitable Foundation of KSLS in support of its professional development efforts and especially its scholarship fund. The Foundation has used the fund to provide financial assistance to many students in support of their surveying education."
"KSLS has been well-known regionally for its educational content through its Salina Seminars and its Annual Meeting," said Joe Paiva, CEO of GeoLearn. "The society has been one of the pioneers in online education by providing the Kansas Minimum Standards for Property Boundary Surveys for its members. We are pleased to collaborate with this forward thinking organization."
"I am pleased to hear that KSLS is preparing to offer online continuing education to surveyors in Kansas through this collaboration with GeoLearn," said Curt Sumner, Executive Director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors. "We have observed that licensing boards are looking more carefully at the content of continuing education offerings, regardless of whether they are face-to-face or online. The robustness of the content, and the process for access to it provided by this collaboration, should be beneficial to the individual surveyors and the profession."
At the outset the KSLS online learning portal will carry over 65 one-hour long video-rich courses. These courses are by well-known presenters such as Wendy Lathrop, Gary Kent, David Doyle, Bill Henning and Dick Elgin. The topics are diverse; some of them are: ALTA surveys, floods and the NIFP, RTK good practices, datums and projections, surveyors notes for plats and unmanned airborne systems. Several Kansas-specific courses are now in the planning stage. As soon as they are available, news about them will be publicized to Kansas’s surveyors. Where applicable, KSLS will obtain approval as a provider for state-specific content from the Kansas Board of Technical professions. The non-Kansas-specific courses created by GeoLearn, do carry where applicable, approval for professional development hours for continuing education credit. The highly acclaimed ABET-accredited geospatial program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi grants this approval. Certificates of completion carry the logo of the university and in addition to GeoLearn’s database, such course activity is maintained for seven years in the database of the university.
The Kansas Society of Land Surveyors (KSLS) is a professional society dedicated to the promotion of the common good and welfare of members engaged in the practice of Land Surveying, to foster high standards of professional ethics and practice, to promote the study of land surveying problems and the education of Land Surveyors. www.ksls.com.
About GeoLearn
GeoLearn, LLC is an online education company, based in the Kansas City metropolitan area that serves professionals and technicians in the surveying, mapping, GIS and related communities with interactive online video courses. As of now, GeoLearn has over 65 courses online in its growing catalog. GeoLearn also provides a complete range of custom video production services for business training, news, publicity, promotion and education purposes.