In recent years, and especially during the period of the pandemic, the necessity of using existing and developing specialized applications that facilitate remote involvement has been highlighted. Moreover, high-skilled specialists in sophisticated 3D spatial analysis, data management, visual analysis, and data dissemination to the public have become increasingly sought in the environmental and geoscience sectors.

Our proposal aspires to establish courses at higher education levels, where students will have the chance to obtain advanced skills in the aforementioned domains. Its goal is to teach students to gather, evaluate and process data using selfie drones, create highly accurate 3D models of the Earth's relief to be used for data collection in Virtual Reality environment, perform spatial analysis and interpret data in a GIS environment and finally disseminate results in a user-friendly manner using GIS applications.

Numerous advantages are to be gained through the integration of teaching courses on managing geo-data in virtual reality and GIS software, by means of which students will have the chance to enjoy an advanced educational experience. The ultimate target of this proposal is to transfer our vision on the transformation of abstract ideas into more concrete and intelligible material, while also to offer a dynamic and stimulating learning environment that keeps students motivated to deal with future challenges and seize any opportunity arising.

The educational material will be delivered both in text format (pdf) and as a series of StoryMaps (one for each step of the workflow). All training material, text, StoryMap and data will be posted online using ArcGIS Hub, a webgis platform that National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) provides us with free access.

The volcanic crater of Nea Kameni (Santorini, Greece) serves as an ideal case study for the teaching material we propose. The data needed as an integral part of the training material are already available and, in our ownership and will be made freely available upon its completion. The applications that will be used are open-source or although they are commercial products, they have been used through their basic or trial/free version.

This HE Teaching Material was supported by the EGU Higher Education Teaching Material Grant 2023