A Digital Education Initiative in Agriculture

Abstract

With the development in Agricultural Science and technology, the need for improved agricultural education throughout the world has been realized. Quality Education in Agriculture is a service that contributes to national development, integration and regional cohesion. With the development in ICT, eLearning has become the part and parcel of education programmes in all sectors of life. Agriculture sector is also not far behind with the inculcation of digital mode of teaching and learning with the conventional teaching mode. In this direction, an eLearning platform “eLearnAgriculture” has been designed and developed for the post graduate courses in Agriculture Sciences (http:// elearnagri.iasri.res.in/home). The system has been developed in way that the teaching, learning, evaluation and administration of the courses and users can be accomplished online. Presently it has been enriched with the fundamental courses under the disciplines of Agricultural Statistics and Computer Applications. The system has the capability to provide teaching and training material in the form of text, graphics, audio and animation. The digital mode provides an opportunity to the agricultural educationists to create and link their course content in a real time format using the multimedia tools which may not be available or accessible with conventional teaching methods. The students also get a chance to study and learn the multimedia enabled digital course content at anytime, anywhere. The standardized format adopted for the digital course content creation on the site has been discussed in this paper along with the technology developed and adopted for the course content creation. The course content has been designed and developed using a standardized format.