Overall this was an extremely useful class with engaging content and assignments. The applications of GIS are endless, and the geography department at UCLA is stellar in teaching this subject. Even before the pandemic, in place of lectures are prerecorded tutorial-esque videos. However, Professor Burkhart was extremely helpful regarding assistance with the weekly projects in the CCLE forums. These projects, typically creating a map or working with spatial data in one form or another, are very time consuming and graded by your TA. My TA Jason was very knowledgeable and helpful with the intricacies such as visual design or QGIS errors and made lab sessions worthwhile with solutions and even examples of his own projects and various applications of GIS. Unfortunately, not all of my peers had the same experience with their TA's and were graded harshly based on aesthetics or inclusion/exclusion of seemingly small details. It also may be difficult to get above an A- as you must go "above and beyond" (which varies according to your TA) if you want to receive 100% on an assignment. Although experiences may differ based on professor and TA, you will definitely learn the material very well and be prepared to equip yourself with a highly valuable and coveted skillset.

I do not know anything about the professor tbh but the sections were really helpful. The only thing I did not like was that you have to do "above and beyond" to get 20/20 on the assignments, so if you do everything correct, you'll get 18/20. The assignments are the most important part of the class (50% - although he made it 70% if we did not want to take the final) and the rest of the class is pretty easy with re-takable tests and discussion. The assignments took me about 3-6 hours each week but they want perfection. I feel like I learned something useful in this class, unlike other GE classes I've taken. I would recommend this class.

(This course is now numbered Geog 181A after the renumbering)
Professor Burkhart does a fantastic job with his online lectures and assignments. Everything you do feels very reasonable and applicable. He also reaches out to his students multiple times during the quarter and felt very accommodating. I highly recommend this professor, and I hope to take more courses with him in the future.

This class was so damn easy. Everything for the week is assigned Monday morning, and I was almost always finished by Monday afternoon. Burkhart is super super clear in his instructions, and the assignments are pretty fun and interesting.

He's a great professor and a very nice person. I would 100% recommend going to office hours, because you can do almost 90% of the work in office hours and he will help you out a ton, because he really cares that you excel in his class and understand the material.

It's definitely a good amount of work, and coming in with little cartography experience made it a little hard for me. But after the first couple of weeks, the work load eased up because I understood a lot of the stuff from previous weeks.

The workload is pretty large but not necessarily difficult. An A is definitely manageable if you can stay on top of the assignments and pay attention to the details on your maps. The TAs can tend to nit pick on certain details which is annoying but the class is overall pretty laid back.

Easy class if you get started on material early in the week. There's one assignment that will need to download for at least 2 hours, and others are tedious just because of the details. I enjoyed this class a lot overall and felt that it was one of the few that taught me solid skills.

Professor Burkhart is probably one of the most engaging/helpful professors I've had all throughout UCLA (just graduated); part of the reason why is because he actually loves what he teaches (he's like a rare Pokemon), and he structures his class to where you actually start liking what he teaches as well.

That isn't to say that this class is an easy one. You definitely need to put at least 10-14 hours (depends on how badly you procrastinate) a week if you want to get a good grade. The assignments are worth way more than the final project, so make sure you don't put those off. In addition, He's also an extremely fair grader: we had an incident in the quarter where we had an undergrad TA that was grading quite harshly, and after a couple of us emailed him, he announced that he would now personally grade all our assignments and gave back points to those who deserved them. I wouldn't say he's an easy grader, but it's just because there are a lot of things he puts on the rubric and a lot of people do the projects last minute and forget to include all the specified guidelines.

I got an A despite doing most if not all my projects last minute, and it included turning in an response assignment late and thus getting a 0. But that's because I just made sure all my maps included the guidelines he specified, and I also did more than expected to create more engaging and creative presentations. So just make sure you do really well on the assignments, and the quizzes & map critiques won't really matter.

Burkhart truly wants his students to enjoy learning about his subjects, and it doesn't matter if you're not into GIS. I certainly wasn't, until I took this class, and I realized these things were actually pretty stinking cool and useful in real life.

The class itself seems like it would be really cool. Assignments make up pretty much all of your grade. I wished I listened to the other review about nitpicking TAs. Grading is absurdly subjective, when I'm not even sure it's supposed to be. Kudos to the professor though, the class is organized really well asynchronously/online.

I enjoyed this class a lot more than I expected to. This class is a requirement for my major, and it definitely took a lot of work to get an A. However, the skills that you learn throughout this course are extremely interesting and likely going to be helpful in the future. As other reviewers have mentioned, I didn't really get to know this professor; the lectures are entirely asynchronous and done by voiceover, and I never had the need to attend office hours. I will say, though, that Professor Burkhart made our final optional and no-harm, which was absolutely fantastic of him to do, so I know he keeps his students in mind throughout this class. Overall, I'm not sure if I would recommend this as a GE unless you are highly interested in GIS, as it does take a significant amount of time and independent study. That being said, I'm super glad it was a required course for me, because I was surprised by how much I enjoyed creating the projects, working with GIS, and seeing the real-world applications of this technology.