Effective asynchronous instruction requires more than recording a lecture and uploading it to a course shell. It requires deliberate design choices: separating conceptual content from technical demonstration, building in natural pause points for student reflection, and grounding abstract methods in examples that are immediately legible to a broad audience.
The examples below represent my approach to online instructional content development. Each pairing: a conceptual overview followed by a software walkthrough, is designed so students can engage with the why before they encounter the *how. Both videos were developed for use in an intermediate GIS course and are intended for students with foundational GIS experience who are ready to move into spatial statistics and pattern analysis.
Mean Center and Weighted Mean Center
Mean center and weighted mean center are among the most foundational measures in spatial analysis: the geographic equivalents of the arithmetic mean. Despite their conceptual simplicity, they are frequently underutilized in applied GIS work, in part because students often encounter them as a software button rather than as a meaningful analytical choice. These two videos are designed to change that.
Video 1: Conceptual Overview (content lecture)
Content-focused | ~7 minutes
This video introduces mean center and weighted mean center as spatial measures of central tendency, building from the familiar concept of the arithmetic mean into two-dimensional geographic space. Using college football conference realignment as a running example — one of the most spatially dramatic stories in recent American sports history — the video walks through the underlying mathematics, the connection between mean center and polygon centroids, and the interpretive power of weighting by a meaningful attribute.
By the end of this video, students should be able to explain what a mean center represents geometrically, calculate one by hand from a small point dataset, and articulate why weighting matters and what it reveals about a spatial distribution.
Video 2: Software Walkthrough (Technical - ArcGIS Pro)
Technical demonstration | ~6 minutes
This video demonstrates the calculation of mean center and weighted mean center in ArcGIS Pro using the college football conference dataset introduced in the conceptual overview. The walkthrough covers locating and running the Mean Center tool, setting up a weight field, interpreting the output layer, and comparing unweighted and weighted results visually on the map.
Students are encouraged to watch the conceptual overview first, then work through this demonstration with the dataset open in their own ArcGIS Pro session. The dataset used in both videos is available for download below.
Dataset
The conference dataset used in both videos spans six time periods from 1988 through 2024, capturing the full arc of FBS conference realignment including the post-2022 mega-realignment. It includes coordinates for all FBS programs, conference affiliations at each time point, and national championship counts for use as a weight field.
Dataset can be obtained: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redicank/WebsiteCharts/main/NCAAall.zip
Kyle James Redican (Ph.D.)