Updating Canada’s List of Geography, GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, Geomatics, Education Programs for 2021

GoGeomatics.ca holds the most comprehensive list of Canadian geography, geomatics, GIS, and remote sensing related education programs.

This resource is incredibly useful for students in Canada and around the world looking to further their education in this great field. However, schools are constantly adjusting, and our list put together in 2017 needs some work. So I was tasked with updating it.

Do you have updates? Email us back!

University and college websites are incredibly hard to navigate. Instead of looking for the program pages and hoping I’d find up-to-date info, I opted to find emails for the department heads and reach out to them so I could get definitive updates and then hopefully be able to have that line of communication for the future, as surely this list will need updating again in five years. Please use our Email contact form to get in touch with updates.

Universities in Canada with GIS programs	Colleges in Canada with GIS programs
24	25

All in all, there are about 50 schools in Canada with programs relevant to the sector, and I emailed them over two days. After a week, we had about a 20% response rate. I then sent a quick reminder email to the other 80%, and that was a good move as we jumped up to about 44% after two weeks.

The 2021 updates

The good news is that there weren’t many major changes to the info we had, which bodes well for us regarding the 66% who either didn’t see our emails or chose not to reply. Only three schools, New Brunswick Community College, NFL Memorial MUN, and Niagara College no longer run any GIS/related programs. A few schools removed one or two programs, though still offer several others.

Mostly, though, there were additions to the list! Concordia and Simon Fraser win for the most. Several schools have added programs, or separated a program into two to be more specialized. And this was pretty even between universities and colleges. There’s still a great range of educational opportunities from certifications that can be done from home to PhD programs. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been some minor changes that vary from school to school. With most students getting double vaccinated, it’s likely that by September 2021, most schools will be offering in-person courses and classes again.

Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS), for example, are returning to in-person learning, but some programs, like their long-standing Cartography program, will stay online. Also, some programs will still offer a mix of in-person and online to best keep students safe.

Overall, the geomatics field is definitely growing in popularity as there seems to be an overall increased demand than there was in 2017.

Help Complete Our Lists!

To the 66% of schools who haven’t replied to us with an update, please do so. We’ve heard that there may be an issue with our email being flagged as spam, so we’re looking into our options to rectify that. If you work at a Canadian school and know there’s info in these lists that should be updated, please let us know, or tell your department head to update us!