Project Summary:

Principal Investigator/Project Directors:

• Patricia A Schoknecht, Rutgers University
• William W. Crosbie, Rutgers University

Description of the Agricultural Communication Network Project:

1. Project Objectives:


• Make optimal use of available resources for agricultural extension, resident education, and research by sharing resources between participating institutions.
  
  
• Facilitate interaction among leading agricultural scientists.
  
  
  
  Explain how the project relates to the Program Objective(s) and how the Project will contribute to achieving these.
  
  Objective 1 Optimal use of resources: Animal nutrition is taught within every college and university with an animal science/agriculture major. By developing and using a shared course, faculty resources will be conserved at every school. The module format used in this course will also allow extension professionals to make use of the material in the field.

  Objective 3 Train students: Animal nutrition is a required course for all animal science majors and is an important elective in food science, nutritional science, and agricultural sciences. Certainly everyone working directly within the animal production industry must have this knowledge. However, it is becoming increasingly important for environmental scientists and natural resource managers to have a basic understanding of an animals nutrient needs and metabolic processes as well.

  Objective 4 Facilitate interactions among scientists: Animal nutritionists across the Northeast and MidAtlantic region will develop a module within their area of scientific expertise. The modules will then be combined to create a complete course that will be superior to a course developed by only one individual. This approach allows each scientists expertise to be leveraged without a tremendous time commitment being requested from any single individual.
  

  
  
  


2. Description of Agricultural Communication Network to be Developed or Utilized.

The course will be developed for use on the WorldWide Web. It will also be possible to disseminate the course via CD-ROM.



Describe the Cost/Benefit Analysis for purchasing (or leasing) different types of facilities, equipment, components, hardware and software, or other items. (complete only if applicable to your project).

Not Applicable

3. Agricultural Communication Network Programming:


• Agricultural Biochemistry
  
• Agricultural Profitability and Sustainability
  
• Animal Science
  
• Biochemistry
  
  
  Describe the Programming and how it will contribute to achieving the Objective(s):
  
  The field of animal science is expanding from our traditional production agriculture base to include the study of laboratory and companion animals, biotechnology, and wildlife. For academic departments to meet the needs of this diverse agricultural clientele without sacrificing quality, we must create ways to cooperate rather than compete. Within the Northeast and MidAtlantic region 14 Departments of Animal Science have developed a coalition to create incentives and develop mechanisms to cooperate so that each of us can continue to progress in our areas of strength, while relying on others in the region to provide assistance where we are weak.
  
  An important component of this cooperation is the development of web-based materials to be used for both resident and outreach education. In this proposal, we are focusing in the area of nutrition and will bring together experts across the region to create a course in basic animal nutrition. This course will be developed in a modular format, allowing participants to design a module within their area of expertise. This allows scientists to contribute to the final product with a relatively small time commitment and in the area in which they are most competent, yet still feel ownership of the final product. Our final course will be composed of these modules and will be far superior to that which is presently being taught by each of us independently.
  
  Developing in a modular format also means that each institution will be able to select a subset of modules to create a customized course that best fits their curriculum and students. As an example, the primary livestock species in Delaware and Maryland is the chicken, in New York the dairy cow and in West Virginia, the beef cow. The Animal Nutrition course taught within the colleges and universities of each state would contain an additional lecture or two on the animal of greatest economic importance to that state. By developing in a modular form, we are allowing for this type of customization from the outset, increasing the adapatability and national appeal of our course. We believe that the ability to customize the course is critical for wide acceptance by faculty.
  
  Many of the experts designing these modules will be extension specialists who can infuse the modules with actual examples from the industry. These examples will help our resident students understand how to apply the basic nutrition knowledge to the real world. At the same time, we will be making the modules available to industry through the extension specialists, helping producers and industry employees improve their basic nutrition knowledge. This type of two-way interaction is critical to position our resident students for success in the future and to provide a format for life-long learning within the industry.
  
  Once developed, Animal Nutrition will be taught in the Web-based form to all students. This will enable non-resident students to register through their state university paying in-state tuition rates. Prior to the course having national acceptance, Rutgers University as project director, will accept the responsibility to develop and administer a course that will be offered nationally for students who cannot, for whatever reason, participate in the course offered by their local land grant university. This web-based course will be of great benefit to part-time students, students in rural areas of the country, and students with various health or physical impediments. Additionally, the availability of this course in a web environment will open the field of animal science to students of color who may not be aware that our field has changed tremendously in the last 20 years and holds substantial career opportunities for students of diverse backgrounds.
  
  Much of this projects success rests on the ability of our faculty and institutions to truly cooperate. We have formalized our partnership to facilitate methods of regional cooperation by creating The Kellogg MidAtlantic Consortium for Preparing Food System Professionals for the 21st Century. To date, the animal science component of this consortium has developed a number of specific partnerships to cooperate in areas of research, extension, and teaching. The two agreements that directly impact this proposal include the development of mechanisms to allow students to attend courses at partner institutions and receive the credits and grade at the home institution, and the creation and signature by our university administrators of an intellectual property agreement that provides a mechanism to protect individual faculty and institutional copyrights, while allowing for inter-institutional development of a single course. Both of these agreements demonstrate that we are serious in our efforts to develop cooperative undergraduate education.
  
  We are also not pursuing these plans in a vacuum. Development of an introductory course in animal science is being undertaken by the Teaching Committee within the American Society of Animal Science, our primary professional organization. The Project Director (Schoknecht) is a member of this national committee and a representative of our Consortium (Bramley, UVM) will sit on the subcommittee charged with putting this introductory course together. The subcommittee has already determined that they will develop in a Web-based modular format, similar to the one we will use for Animal Nutrition. The fact that our major professional organization has become involved in such efforts demonstrates that, as a discipline, we believe development of our core courses is a national need and we have an international dissemination network already in place. Additionally, by developing a course required of all majors, rather than focusing on more specialized elective courses, we are ensuring that we have a large audience for the course, allowing costs to be amortized over many students and several years.
  
  This project addresses several of the objectives of the Agricultural Telecommunications Program. Importantly, pooling our collective expertise in nutrition to create a modular course, we make optimal use of resources and facilitate interaction among animal scientists across the Northeast region. In addition, use of the Web to reach students, producers, industry scientists and researchers allows for rapid transmission of state-of-the-art information in nutrition which is critical for the continued success of US agriculture at home and abroad.
  


Detailed description of methods to be used in producing and/or delivering the programing.

Production of Programming
The course, Animal Nutrition, will be developed in a modular format. The nutritionists within the Consortium have already determined the list of modules that need to be developed and content specialists have been identified and recruited. The content specialists will work with an instructional technologist to convert their written text, figures, and slides into a multimedia format. When a first draft is completed, the module will undergo a peer-review process by others in the region. The Project Director (Schoknecht) will monitor module progress, assign peer reviewers, and serve as an overall editor to ensure that the individual pieces form a coherent course.

The modules will be developed using a true multimedia approach. Current educational research has demonstrated that learning is enhanced when information is presented in a variety of forms rather than using any single method. Therefore, we will be presenting our information in multimodal forms. These include standard text and figures, animated figures with voice-overs, transcripts of all audio text, figures which allow learners to control their cognizant load at any given point in time, video, definitions in text and spoken words, mathematical calculations, simulations, and self-tests. We are very aware that multimedia can be overused and actually detract from the learners ability to understand the information. We will work very hard to use methods that are appropriate to convey a given piece of information, but we will also present the same information in multiple forms to allow the learner to customize information presentation to match their learning style, opening avenues of learning for students who have difficulty succeeding in a traditional lecture format.

Each module will be designed as a stand-alone unit, however it will be integrated into the whole through a playback system which we have already developed (PD: Crosbie). This system provides the structure within which the content is placed, giving the course a common look and feel and providing the students with a single, consistent navigation system with which to interact with the information. This system is also innovative in that it is capable of dynamically searching the metadata displayed on a page and finding other places in the database where these same metadata appear. Links to these other locations are generated under the heading "Related Concepts", allowing the learner the opportunity to move through the database (i.e. the modules) to reinforce their knowledge on particular concepts of interest. Since these connections are generated dynamically by the system, the number of links increases automatically as new information is added to the database. We have developed the playback system using the emerging IMS standards, so if these standards are accepted across the education community, our course will be compliant.

We are experienced in module development because we have been funded in this area for the last two years through a USDA Higher Education Challenge Grant. This grant provided the funding to develop the playback system and 6 animal nutrition content modules. These 6 modules were developed by 4 Consortium faculty at 4 different institutions. A single instructional technologist worked with these 4 faculty and now possesses the requisite technical skills and is experienced in helping faculty understand how to turn a traditional lecture into a multimedia module. We believe that we have all of the pieces in place to create an excellent course in a reasonable period of time.

Course Delivery
Every institution will have the ability to offer Animal Nutrition as a computer-based course over the WorldWide Web through their own curriculum. They will pay a fee to the Consortium (reduced for Consortium members) based on enrollment. If an institution prefers, Rutgers University will administer the course for them. The protection of intellectual property and issues of copyright among the faculty and institutions that develop this course are detailed in the intellectual property agreement that has been signed by the Consortium institutions. Income to the Consortium from Animal Nutrition will be used for course maintenance and continued update and improvement. Any additional funds will be used to develop other courses of interest to Consortium members.




4. Population to be Served and Target Audience(s):

The Course:
1) Animal Nutrition is a required course for all animal science majors and an important elective in food science, nutritional sciences, and agricultural sciences. It is becoming increasingly important in areas of environmental science and natural resource management as well.

2) The course will also serve as a resource for outreach education to learners throughout the food system as they remain current on new developments in animal nutrition.

3) The audience for this course will be progressively expanded from regional to national to international.

Resource Allocation:
1) All animal science and agriculture departments presently teach a course in animal nutrition. Therefore, all of them would be able to reallocate faculty teaching resources.

2) New tuition dollars may flow into programs as industry personnel now have the opportunity to take a formal university course with the removal of distance and time constraints.



5. Collaborating Institutions and Other Partners:

The 14 institutions that are Consortium partners and the primary contact person for the nutrition course are listed below. Several institutions have more than one nutritionist taking part. Letters of commitment from those institutions are being sent with the cover letter and budget forms.

Cornell University - Alan Bell
Delaware State University - Richard Barczewski
Delaware Valley College - Michael Schlegel
Rutgers University - Patricia Schoknecht
Sussex County Community College - Martha Hughes
University of Connecticut - Sheila Andrews
University of Delaware - William Saylor
University of Maine - Martin Stokes
University of Maryland, College Park - Geoffrey Dahl
University of Maryland, Eastern Shore - Jeannine Harter-Dennis
University of Massachusetts - Robert Duby
University of New Hampshire - Peter Erickson
University of Vermont - Joanne Knapp
West Virginia University - John Warren





6. Additional Rationale for Project





7. Significant Impacts:

1) This project will fundamentally alter the manner in which basic animal nutrition is taught at our land grant institutions. Rather than a single professor at every institution creating and giving a relatively common set of lectures, we will be able to leverage and combine our knowledge to create a far superior course.

2) The development of this course will allow every institution to reallocate teaching resources away from this basic course and towards more advanced courses that require greater student-faculty interaction.

3) Most of the computer-based courses created in agriculture have been speciality courses that are difficult to justify teaching at every institution because they do not attract sufficient enrollment. However, this also means it will be difficult to cover the high development costs associated with creating a computer-based course because of low enrollments. By developing animal nutrition as a computer-based course, we will be developing a high enrollment course that will allow us to spread development costs across many students and semesters.





8. Describe the plans for evaluation, dissemination and assessment:

Evaluation
Module Development
Formative Evaluation: Each module will undergo peer evaluation for content and information presentation by two experts within that content area. These reviews will be used by the development team to improve the module prior to its initial release to students.

Summative Evaluation: Once the module is completed, it will be tested on a group of students to evaluate ease of use and ability to transfer knowledge, with knowledge retention assessed by a quiz.

Course Development
Formative Evaluation: As modules are completed, they will be combined to create the course. Faculty teaching basic animal nutrition across the nation will be asked to review the course as it is being assembled and expanded.

Summative Evaluation: The true final evaluation of this course will be the number of institutions that adopt it because these institutions will come to the independent conclusion that we have created a high quality offering.

Cost-Effectiveness: The cost-effectiveness of developing a basic animal nutrition course will be evaluated by determining the amount of faculty time and real dollars that are being saved by each institution that adopts the course.

Resource Reallocation: Programs that adopt the course will also be asked how they are reallocating the savings within their program. An ability to put faculty time and institutional support into starting new programs or improving existing programs may be the greatest benefit of all.

Dissemination: We will begin to use the course initially within our region and report our success at the National American Society of Animal Science meetings. Through this organization we will also be able to disseminate the availability of the course nationally and internationally. The ASAS Teaching Committee has initiated a similar development effort for Introductory Animal Science and will be alerting our membership to the plans for these courses and their coming availability.





9. Broader Impacts:

An asynchronous, modular course in basic animal nutrition developed and maintained by experts in each modular area will have a significant impact on the knowledge available to all of agriculture. We will be providing foundation information that will be used by resident students, extension agents, and industry personnel as they work to keep abreast of the newest developments in nutrition and the applicability of new findings to the tasks of feeding production animals and managing their wastes. This course will also have a significant impact on animal science and agriculture programs as they reallocate the resources they used to spend in teaching basic animal nutrition.

The development and implementation of this course in our region will further enhance the collaboration that is ongoing in the 11-state region encompassing 14 institutions that are involved in the Kellogg MidAtlantic Consortium.

We believe that the changing nature of animal science is truly opening the field to groups of people who are presently under-represented. The careers available across animal agriculture are sufficiently varied that there is truly something for everyone. However, the traditional image of animal agriculture tends to prevent many people from even considering the field. The animal nutrition computer-based course could help people of diverse backgrounds to consider animal agriculture as a career opportunity.

This course is being designed from the outset to be customized by individual institutions. This customization will allow it to be applicable across the nation and internationally. Only by doing this will the course gain sufficient acceptance to have a national/international impact.





10. Proposed Timetable:

Due to a previous USDA Higher Education Challenge grant, the playback system and 6 modules are completed. The 12 months of this grant will be used to create 18 additional modules that will provide the basis of the asynchronous course with sufficient flexibility for customization. Modules will be evaluated as they are completed, with the outline of the course evaluated in the final two months of this grant. The final evaluation of the course in terms of rate of adoption, cost-benefit analysis, and resource reallocation measures will have to wait until the following year when the course can actually be offered in place of the traditional course.

The development of 1.5 modules every month is an ambitious undertaking. However, we believe we can reach this goal because we have the content experts already identified and we have an experienced instructional technologist on staff.

September 1999 - August 2000: Module development
October 1999 - August 2000: Peer review of modules
July 2000 - August 2000: Evaluation of course outline





11. Project Personnel and Time Commitment:



Patricia A. Schoknecht, 20%

Dr. Schoknecht will be the project director. She has identified and recruited the content experts and will recruit the peer reviewers. She will be responsible for the overall management of the project.

William W. Crosbie, 10%
Mr. Crosbie is the Multimedia Coordinator within the Department of Animal Science, Rutgers University and is the author of the playback system that will be used in the course. He will have primary day-to-day supervisory responsibility for the instructional technologist.

T. Emmett Kluxen 100%
Mr. Kluxen will be the instructional technologist on this project. He is experienced in developing animal nutrition modules, working within the environment of the playback system, and in working with faculty content experts to turn their lecture notes into asynchronous, multimedia modules.




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