Food & The Environment - University of Florida
° M. E. Swisher & Ron Thomas

AGG 5425 Food & the Environment is a three credit graduate course offered to on-campus and distance students at the University of Florida. The course deserves recognition for both its early, innovative use of distance technology and for its outstanding quality. Dr. Swisher developed and teaches the course, and Mr. Thomas selected and maintains the technology.

Food & the Environment was one of the first courses that was fully web based. Offered for the first time in fall semester of 1996, the instructors were some of the first to use the interactive capacity of the Internet to permit distance students to gain the benefits of full classroom interactivity. The subject matter of Food & the Environment focuses on the complex relationships between food production and environmental quality. The original goal of the course was to educate high school science teachers about these issues. With the development of a distance degree program in IFAS, the emphasis has evolved to include a broader group of educators, including those who teach in non-formal settings.

Food & the Environment has evolved to take advantage of the increasing availability of high quality, science-based information on the web. One goal of the course is to teach participants to distinguish between scientifically reputable and non-reputable Internet based resources. To this end, students use required readings from many government sources, including international sources. The course has also evolved technologically. There is now a dedicated server and state of the art bulletin board and chat software. Instructor's comments have evolved from e-mail to HTML, to Power Point presentations and now full PDF documents. These overview lectures for each module permit students to focus on more detailed examination of specific topics.

Food & the Environment offers students a learning experience that is equal or superior to a traditional "classroom" experience. It fully incorporates participatory, self-guided learning and offers students some opportunities that they could not get in a normal classroom. For example, one module includes an expert panel (chat format) on biotechnology and experts from around the nation serve on that panel. This would be cost prohibitive in a normal classroom. The course is designed to provide maximum individual interaction with the instructor. This enhanced availability, compared to traditional office hours, permits the adult distance learner to ask questions and discuss issues with the faculty during a much broader range of hours and when he/she is in an active learning mode. The excellence of the course has been demonstrated by winning several national awards from professional organizations.

Web-based Horticulture - Cornell University
° Kenneth Mudge and Kelly Hennigan

Innovation in extension-based horticultural distance education has been the goal of Mudge and his graduate student Kelly Hennigan. Gardening by amateur horticulture enthusiasts is a popular avocation among a growing segment of our society. Mudge and Hennigan have documented a growing demand for non-traditional educational opportunities via distance learning (DL) in this area. They have responded to this demand from gardening enthusiasts by forging a unique collaboration between traditional campus-based horticulture and community-based Cornell Cooperative Extension. They have designed and tested an innovative pedagogical approach that embraces the latest advances in Internet-based instructional technologies to carry conventional extension outreach beyond the traditional boundaries of space and time. This effort has required meeting the challenge head-on of providing meaningful opportunities for learning hands-on skills at a distance.

Not only has Professor Mudge demonstrated innovative education but he has also been highly creative in building a human network across the State University of New York (SUNY). Three years ago Mudge and Bill Head (SUNY Morrisville) developed and initiated a horticultural distance learning course called The How, When, and Why of Grafting, a Distance Learning Approach (http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hort494/mg/). The 2-credit course has been offered to Cornell residential students for the three successive Spring semesters.

Moreover, Professor Mudge has actively engaged the Cornell University technology support staff in design and development of course materials. This again required collaborative effort to bring together technologists along with faculty and others who are engaged in the development processes.

IDEAL2 Videoconference Team
° Erik Anderson, University of Idaho
° Scott Fedale, Washington State University
° James Hamilton, University of Illinois
° Valorie McAlpin, University of Maryland- College Park
° Craig Wood, University of Kentucky

This team, chaired by Valerie McAlpin of the University of Maryland-College Park, did an outstanding job of organizing the IDEAL2 National Videoconference. This collaborative effort represented an outstanding effort in educational programs involving more than 75 institutions across the United States and in Australia in a synchronous discussion of Ideal Distance Education Administration. The program also continues to reach people throughout the world from the web in streaming form.

The evaluations from this program were very positive, particularly with respect to the four case studies produced on the 1) award winning programs at the University of Kentucky; 2) Quality produced by McAlpin including leaders from the University of Maryland-College Park, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Oklahoma; 3) TADDA produced jointly by Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of Idaho; and 4) the Great Plains IDEA consortium selected for an Honorable Mention in this year's Excellence in Distance Education competition. These case studies are being used in a variety of settings.

The event served as a hallmark of cooperation between ADEC, EDUCAUSE and the Pew Foundation initiative on Academic Transformation. Brian Hawkins, EDUCAUSE President and Carol Twigg, Academic Transformation, appeared live in the program, making substantive contributions to ADEC members= perspectives on the application of technology to administration of educational programming.

The IDEAL2 Videoconference also served as a vehicle for showcasing the visionary contributions of Dr. Sam Smith, President Emeritus of Washington State University and outgoing Chair of the NASULGC Board. He opened the program and appeared live with Washington State host, Scott Fedale.

The WSU team did an outstanding job of producing and arranging for the program. The set and visuals were superior, and again this work is allowing ADEC to draw upon it for additional use. The IDEAL2 videoconference report was published by Cornell University and serves as another fundamental document for the consortium. This is exactly the type of educational program that can result when many ADEC members participate together. Results of this effort will continue to be seen for many years to come.