Joseph Holler

Take this class!!! I was nervous to take GEOG 261 but I ended with a high sense of achievement and confidence. After taking this class I am very excited about the opportunities at Midd and in beyond in geospatial work. Here is what I liked: 1) Professor Holler is organized, kind, accommodating, and extremely skilled and passionate about the subject and pedology of this class. His lectures were engaging and introduced me to interesting and current geospatial work in that I get to nerd out on. 2) The course has a full time employee to aid the class. Ola explains and troubleshoots concepts clearly and kindly. I cannot express how much of an asset she was to the course. 3) There are nightly TA hours, so if you are slow at getting the content, there is always help that is worth your time to get. 4) You really learn the concepts through the assigned videos, practice in lab, and projects. The progressive way the course is taught helps you continuously practice what you learn all the way up until the end. 5) Making workflows is creative and fun. Having this problem-solving as required independent work in the course was challenging but rewarding. 6) The exams were challenging, but not unfairly. They required you to really learn the content, which I appreciated. They were paper exams with open notes to your course manual (aka all of the answers if you have developed critical thinking about how to use GIS tools throughout the course). The grading was fair and Holler is good at honoring academic accommodations. Here is what I didn't like: 1) This course does not use Canvas. While I liked the course website, I disliked Gradescope for viewing the results of my exams because is was hard to tell where I got points off. 2) There is a weekly quiz on content from the online lectures at the start of each week. I would have done better on these quizzes had they been assigned at the end of the week when I had time to ask questions and re-learn content presented in the videos in lecture and lab.

Take this class!!! I was nervous to take GEOG 261 but I ended with a high sense of achievement and confidence. After taking this class I am very excited about the opportunities at Midd and in beyond in geospatial work. Here is what I liked: 1) Professor Holler is organized, kind, accommodating, and extremely skilled and passionate ab …Read more

While the concepts and exams of this course are challenging, Professor Holler is very effective at explaining concepts. However, not much happens in lectures except explaining the next lab and working threw a few concepts. Labs can be challenging but there is plenty of help, and visual essays are very fun and a different approach to grading.

This class had a lot of interesting material and Professor Holler was very passionate about the subjects, but the teaching style did not really work for me. Before every lecture there are a few required readings, which are difficult to digest independently, and I was often only able to understand them after class discussions. Nearly every week there was a paper due, which varied in minimum length and work load, but the instructions were often vague and difficult to plan out. That being said, Professor Holler is a fair grader and he is very approachable for help.

This class had a lot of interesting material and Professor Holler was very passionate about the subjects, but the teaching style did not really work for me. Before every lecture there are a few required readings, which are difficult to digest independently, and I was often only able to understand them after class discussions. Nearly …Read more