We are pleased to announce our 2024 schedule for in-person courses at the Shaftesbury Centre, Swindon! Click below to book your place.
We are passionate about sharing knowledge and best practice with historic environment professionals. That’s why we have worked in collaboration with Air Photo Services, to establish a programme of training courses in the use of airborne laser scanned data (lidar) and QGIS for historic environment assessment. The courses listed below are held at the Shaftsbury Centre, Swindon with a maximum of 8 participants, but for groups of four or more we can bring the course to you! Just drop us a line to discuss.
Making the Most of Lidar
CIFA Approved 1 day course
Next Date: Spring 2025
Cost: £200 (including refreshments & lunch)
Our popular introduction to using publicly available lidar data from the Environment Agency. With almost >95% coverage for England and Wales now available there has never been a better time to learn how to integrate lidar into your workflows.
find out more…
Run by professionals with many years experience in using lidar data for historic landscape analysis, this course covers essential concepts needed to integrate lidar data into your workflows. Through a series of presentations, practical guidance and hands on sessions this course will explore how to access, prepare, and manipulate digital lidar data. We’ll be covering current best practise for visualising the data as well as lots of practical exercises, because we believe that learning by doing is best. In addition to the ‘hands on’ practicals, there will be plenty of opportunity for questions and group discussion during the course of the day.
Download our course information sheet for full details of the course aims and learning objectives.
booking terms
The course is £200 per participant, including lunch and refreshments. Paypal payment via our website preferred but payment via invoice can be arranged.
Numbers are limited to 8 places so pre-booking is essential and bookings close two weeks before the course date (or earlier if all spaces are filled). If you find that you can’t attend we will refund the cost of the course minus an administrative fee of £30 until noon 14 days prior to the course date. Refunds will not be made after this point, but transferring your place to another individual or credit for a future course will be considered where possible.
Lidar at the Desk and in the Field
CIFA Approved 2 day course
Next Dates: May 2025
Cost: £400 (including refreshments, lunch & travel to site)
Run annually each spring, this course complements the Making the Most of Lidar course presentations and practicals on day one with the option to spend the day out on site, putting your new-found lidar interpretation skills into practice!
find out more…
On day one you’ll get to grips with the Environment Agency data through presentations and hands-on tutorials. On day two, we will explore a landscape within 1 hour of Swindon and make field observations of a range of features identified in the lidar data processed on day one. This greatly enhances the interpretation of the data, leading to improved understanding of what can (and cannot) be identified using lidar. There will be lots of opportunity to discuss ideas and issues faced when combining remote data and field observations.
Download our course information sheet for full details of the course aims and learning objectives.
booking terms
The course is £400 per participant, including lunch, refreshments and travel to site on day two. Paypal payment via our website preferred but payment via invoice can be arranged.
Numbers are limited to 8 places so pre-booking is essential and bookings close two weeks before the course date (or earlier if all spaces are filled). If you find that you can’t attend we will refund the cost of the course minus an administrative fee of £30 until noon 14 days prior to the course date. Refunds will not be made after this point, but transferring your place to another individual or credit for a future course will be considered where possible.
Advanced Lidar for Historic Environment Professionals
CIFA Approved 2 day course
Next Dates: 6th and 7th November 2024
Cost: £600 (including refreshments, lunch and social dinner on the evening of the 6th)
This 2-day course covers every step of the lidar acquisition and processing workflow from commissioning survey, point cloud to 3D visualisation. Our advanced lidar course is perfect for those who want to deepen their understanding of how the data can be specified, processed and shared with clients.
find out more…
Over two days we’ll cover the following topics in a series of presentations and practical sessions:
- Introduction to the point cloud – formats and attributes
- Viewing and assessing the quality of point cloud data
- Classifying the point cloud
- Generating terrain and intensity raster
- Generating mask layers
- Viewing the point-cloud with LAStools
- Advanced raster processing in QGIS
- Commissioning lidar survey
- 3D visualisations to share with colleagues and clients
Download our course information sheet for full details of the course aims and learning objectives.
booking terms
The course is £600 per participant, including lunch and refreshments. Paypal payment via our website preferred but payment via invoice can be arranged.
Numbers are limited to 8 places so pre-booking is essential and bookings close two weeks before the course date (or earlier if all spaces are filled). If you find that you can’t attend we will refund the cost of the course minus an administrative fee of £30 until noon 14 days prior to the course date. Refunds will not be made after this point, but transferring your place to another individual or credit for a future course will be considered where possible.
Introduction to QGIS for Desk Based Research
CIFA Approved 1 day course
Next In Person Dates: spring 2025
Cost: £200 (including refreshments and lunch)
* This course is also available through our online platform Learnlidar.com, with continuous enrolment via this link
If everything happens somewhere then geographical information systems (GIS) have to be one of the best tools available historic environment professionals. Our one day course will get you set up with all the basics so that you can use QGIS for your work or research. Run by historic environment professionals with over a decade of experience in a variety of GIS applications, this course covers essential concepts needed to understand and use QGIS.
find out more…
Our one day course will get you set up with all the basics so that you can use QGIS for your work or research. Run by historic environment professionals with over a decade of experience in a variety of GIS applications, this course covers essential concepts needed to understand and use QGIS.
Our one day course will get you set up with all the basics so that you can use QGIS for your work or research. Run by historic environment professionals with over a decade of experience in a variety of GIS applications, this course covers essential concepts needed to understand and use QGIS.
Through practical guidance and hands on sessions this course will cover the following topics:
- Setting up your GIS project
- Sourcing and importing different types of data
- Georeferencing images
- Digitising features to a shapefile
- Styles and labelling
- Saving and printing maps for publication
- Finding help and further resources
Download our course information sheet for full details of the course aims and learning objectives.
booking terms
The course is £200 per participant, including lunch and refreshments. Paypal payment via our website preferred but payment via invoice can be arranged.
Numbers are limited to 8 places so pre-booking is essential and bookings close two weeks before the course date (or earlier if all spaces are filled). If you find that you can’t attend we will refund the cost of the course minus an administrative fee of £30 until noon 14 days prior to the course date. Refunds will not be made after this point, but transferring your place to another individual or credit for a future course will be considered where possible.
Good to know…
Requirements
You will need to bring a laptop and mouse with you to ensure that you can participate in the practical sessions. All practical sessions will be undertaken in QGIS, an open-source geographical information software (download instructions will be sent with your registration confirmation).
Registration
There will be a maximum of 8 participants so please book and pay in advance to secure your place on the course. Payment via Paypal or credit card at time of booking is preferred, please contact us if this is not possible.
Booking T&Cs
If you find that you can’t attend we will refund the cost of the course minus an administrative fee of £30 until noon on Friday two weeks before the course. Refunds will not be made after this point, but transferring your place to another individual or credit for a future course will be considered where possible.
Our courses typically require a minimum of three participants to run. In the unlikely case that there are not enough bookings to run a course we will notify participants and make a full refund of the course fee by noon on Friday two weeks before the course date.
CIfA Approval
CIfA gives formal endorsement of CPD courses provided by external training providers if they meet the following criteria:
- Appropriate and achievable learning outcomes
- learning outcomes set out in terms of National Occupational Standards (NOS)
- certification for the purposes of CPD, with reference to the CIfA CPD requirement
- learning outcomes are monitored
- appropriate competence in trainers
- appropriate delegate numbers and/or tutor-delegate ratios
- attention to the specific learning needs of delegates and the ability to adapt if necessary
- provision for ongoing evaluation of the course and a process for modification in the light of delegate feedback
How to Find Us
All our courses are held at the Shaftesbury Centre, Swindon, SN2 2AZ
The Shaftesbury Centre is within easy reach of Swindon train station. Bus Route 5 connects the station to Rodbourne Road and a taxi one-way should be around £7.50. There is ample free public parking off Morris Street, to the rear of the Shaftesbury Centre building.
The training room is on the second floor with lift access. Please let us know if you will need any specific modifications to make your training day more comfortable.