INNOVATION IN EXTENSION: University of Delaware

The following describes an innovation.

Region: Northeast

Main contact information for this innovation: Nancy Gregory

Main contact job title / position: Plant Diagnostician

Main contact number: 302-831-1390

Main contact email address:  ngregory@udel.edu

Innovation name: Pocket Farmer

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: New App for conifer diagnostics developed by a team of students

Notes from phone interview:

This idea was generated by a conversation in the Northeast Region by the Northeast Regional Directors about what we might be able to do around innovation. And we had had quite a bit of discussion, we had read a book, and we talked about innovation and what we can bring. And then, how do we put that into action? And it was one of the more exciting conversations we had, because it wasn't just about day-to-day operational issues. And this App Challenge came out of that, in terms of asking everybody in the region to consider development of - and it was very broad - a mobile app that could be used by cooperative extension. Basically the challenge was to develop a mobile app for extension and utilize students in our institutions to help develop that.

*There is much more on this innovation in the transcript*


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Northeast

Main contact information for this innovation: Kathleen Splane

Main contact job title / position: Program Leader FCS

Main contact number: 302-730-4000

Main contact email address:  ksplane@udel.edu

Innovation name: Master Educator training

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: Master volunteers in a particular program across the state are trained all at the same time using adobe connect technology

Notes from phone interview:

Yeah. We have a number of different kind of master educators: master food educators, master gardeners. Every state has their own group of masters. However, particularly with our master gardener program, we only had three counties in Delaware - big counties - and we have three different master gardener programs. And so, our faculty would go out, specialists would go out to train that, and it they were different times of year, and different ones for different parameters. So we said, "How can we utilize distance technology to have a state wide training and focus for a master gardener program?" So, this has been all around an initiative to have state wide programs versus individual county programs. But I came to this, "Okay, how can we resource and do that?" So we've moved-- it's taken a year to put the planning in place to be able to turn the schedule for each of the counties and to come to an agreement of how we do that, but we've now moved into-- and this fall will be the first that we're doing our master gardener training. We will do it one time for everyone across the state. We have one common application, one set of training, and it will all be done by Adobe Connect. And we'll use the distance technology to be able to the training, and sometimes the trainer might be in one of the counties and the next time they might be in another. So, they do have some-- and there will be some follow up educator part that will be hands-on, but it's the first time that we're doing that for the master gardener program.

We had another form of this with our master food educator. I guess that was last spring. We did one training for all the master food educators, and we used Adobe Connect to do that. And that was the first we did, again, the state wide approach using technology to have the same instructor across the entire state at the same time. And we have requested right now some funding to evaluate the effectiveness of this delivery method for what type of training that's generally been very hands-on and face-to-face, and actually measuring if our volunteers develop the skills that they need to be volunteers by this delivery. So, we have a proposal in right now to [e-Extension?] to have this be a project that they might pick up, so we can evaluate if this model really does work. It's in many ways, convincing the naysayers that distance technology can be a way to train people effectively. And there's already some research out there that speaks to us, but this would be specifically to volunteers who need to have some skill sets, like learning to teach and learning to diagnose. It's more than just knowledge gain. They have to have the application skills. Can we use distance technology and have volunteers receive application knowledge, that they can apply the knowledge in real-life situations.


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Northeast

Main contact information for this innovation: Amy Shober

Main contact job title / position: Extension Specialist

Main contact number: 302-831-2146

Main contact email address:  ashober@udel.edu

Innovation name: On line certification training nutrient manatement

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: In process--development of nutrient management courses for certification provided on line

Notes from phone interview:

This is another one where I'm using another part of the university. [?] been looking at how we can do online delivery, course delivery, and I went through a course last summer here for faculty on online course development and tried to do that myself and tried to test that idea, and just found that the system that we had to use and the process and how much skill set I had to get in instructional design was probably a very limiting factor for us to be able to innovate that. But in the meantime, we came to discover our professional and continuing education unit, which is not outside the university, but it's a whole other unit from our academic technology online program. And in talking with them, they were very interested in partnering with us to develop that, so we now have three courses. The nutrient management is one of three courses that we're working with, where we bring the content to them, they develop a budget of what it's going to cost to do the instructional design on that, and what's the potential for doing that. We can opt in or out of using their marketing on that. They have a registration process in place that uses the credit card system approved process for the university for that. And so, they can manage the course management for us. So, we bring the content, they help us with the instructional design, marketing if we choose, and registration, and then we have the online course.

So, we have actually three courses, and the nutrient management is one that-- the main one of those where we started. The three courses that we're trying to bring online are typical extension workshops, but that we would now have available 24/7 with a cost recovery plan in place. So, that's what they are. Again, I don't think the idea is novel. I think lots of people are doing this. For us, what's novel is that we don't have any courses online at present, and we had been-- one of the courses that we're doing, we had been exploring through [e-Extension?] through the [?] piece, but we just seemed to have trouble getting it off the ground. And like I said, I tried this other thing this summer. So this is actually our third shot at it, and I think we're going to be successful with this one [laughter]. But again, it was finding the right partner and the right resources to help us to make that happen.

So, we have three in process. We hope to have them all up and running by 2016. So, in the next year we hope to have three online courses. And again, that would be-- even in my newsletters I send out every week to the staff on Friday mornings - tomorrow - I'm saying, "These are in process, what's your next idea about courses that we would move to the online piece?" So, that's where we are with that. I'm just very impressed with these instructional designers who really have been able to meet with our staff and have been able to take the content and make it very usable without use having to learn - that's been a real key - without us having to learn all those instructional design skill sets. All we have to know is the content, and how we might engage people. And they even encourage us in other ways that we might engage people that we haven't thought about, because we're not skilled online instructors. So, they say, "Well, why don't you try adding in this activity that makes this more engaging?" And they really help us with that. So, I know lots of people have done this; this is just an innovation for us. We haven't, so that's where we're at.