An eLearning System for Agricultural Education

Abstract

With the development in ICT, eLearning which is the new paradigm of learning and teaching has become the partand parcel of education programmes in all sectors of life. With the development in Agricultural Science andtechnology, the need for improved agricultural education throughout the world has also been realized. QualityEducation in Agriculture is a service that contributes to national development, integration and regional cohesion.But compared to other business and management fields, eLearning in the field of agriculture is still in the earlyphases of development and adoption. In this direction, an eLearning system “eLearnAgriculture” was designedand developed at IASRI, New Delhi, which is available online at http://elearnagri.iasri.res.in/home. The system hasbeen tested and validated by deploying the sample courses from Agricultural Statistics and Computer Applications.Each course has been distributed into well defined topics with each topic having the online features of glossary,interactive lessons, multimedia enabled presentations, quiz and assignments. The features of this system includesthe separate modules for teachers, learners, evaluators and administrator with the facility of an equation editor formathematical equations and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) for multimedia enabled coursecontents. The open source Learning Management System, MOODLE has been used for creating the eLearningdocuments, management of contents and users. The modular nature of MOODLE has been used in this system to addthe new features such as an equation editor, frequently required mathematical symbols and a new user interface.The system provides an opportunity to the agricultural educationists to create and link their course contentsonline. This paper presents the technology behind this system along with the content standardization scheme andthe common template followed for creating the courses.