eXtension Selects 8 Projects For Acceleration From Cooperative Extension for 2020-2021

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As part of eXtension’s New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement with USDA-NIFA, the eXtension Foundation selected 8 projects from 33 competitive nominations across the system for year two to participate in its project accelerator program. The nomination process opened in May 2020 and closed in July 2020. All Land Grant Universities were eligible to submit nominations. The project period is September 1, 2020 to August 31, 2021. Requirements included:

  • Projects must be in early stages of maturity and have a high potential for making a significant local impact and providing a model for adoption by other Extension professionals regionally or nationwide. This means the project is likely to have objectives completed, audiences identified, outcomes identified and has had some early stage of implementation. 
  • Each nomination should identify a lead (a Fellow) for the project that will serve as the primary contact.
  • All nominations must have the support of the Extension Director/Administrator.

These projects will receive wrap-around services from the eXtension Foundation to support and amplify the project outcomes. Wrap-around services include:

  • Project/Program advisory support from a Catalyst (current or past senior program or administrative Cooperative Extension Service (CES) personnel).
  • Support to compose a peer-reviewed publication of resources and processes used by the project which might be an eFieldbook or ePub publication.
  • Evaluation support
  • Digital engagement support for digital learning and instructing
  • Leadership support and training for adaptation to a digital environment 
  • Optional Wrap Around Services
    • Market research and messaging
    • Partnership development assistance 

Nominations were reviewed for alignment to the USDA Strategic Goals.  The selected projects are:

  • Community Learning Through Data Driven Discovery: Barriers to Rural Health, Virginia Tech
  • Southern University Jagriculture Emergency Preparedness, Southern University
  • The Juntos Program: Building Common Measures for National Sustainability, North Carolina State University
  • Equipping Western Rangeland Managers to Create Land Management Plans, Oregon State University
  • Oregon State University Extension Fire Program, Oregon State University
  • Wellness In Tough Times Toolkit, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  • Strengthening Health, Resilience and Farm Vitality through Online Forums, University of Delaware
  • Navigating the Grocery Store Aisle: Understanding Non-GMO Labeling, University of Connecticut

Three of the selected projects that were nominated had incubated their projects through eXtension’s Impact Collaborative program. This includes the Southern University Jagriculture Emergency Preparedness, Wellness in Tough Times Toolkit, and Strengthening Health, Resilience and Farm Vitality through Online Forums projects. eXtension’s Impact Collaborative project incubator program is a professional development experience for Cooperative Extension professionals. It provides learning opportunities geared towards innovation while bringing strategic support and new capacity to the System. These experiences are enhanced with the help of external partners and supporting organizations. Working together, we find new ways to generate visible and measurable local impact. The Impact Collaborative is supported by membership funding and is available exclusively to eXtension members.

Several teams that were not selected as projects for 2020-2021 have been invited to further develop their projects over the next year through eXtension’s Impact Collaborative program to help prepare them for future nomination opportunities. 

eXtension Catalysts providing the program/project advisory support for Year 2 include:

  • Scott Reed, Retired Vice Provost for University Outreach and Engagement and Director of OSU Extension Service
  • Fred Schlutt, Retired Vice Provost for Extension and Outreach at University of Alaska Fairbanks
  • Rick Klemme, Former Executive Director, ECOP
  • Chuck Hibberd, Retired Dean of Cooperative Extension, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

More information about each project will be available in the coming weeks at eXtension.org/ntae.

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New eFieldbook Available! Using Digital Technology in Extension Education

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As part of eXtension’s New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement with USDA-NIFA, the eXtension Foundation selected Dr. Rose Hayden-Smith as the Technology in Extension Education Fellow for year one (2019-2020). Part of her fellowship was the creation of the first version of the Using Digital Technology in Extension Education eFieldbook. 

The eXtension eFieldbook series provides a digital platform for aggregating content, tools, and engagement, and is available to all professionals in Cooperative Extension.

The emergence of COVID-19 has required Cooperative Extension professionals to respond quickly to changing needs. Many are working out of their homes and working hard to find ways to use technology to serve their communities. Cooperative Extension is facing unprecedented challenges and we are learning.

This edition of the Using Digital Technology in Extension Education eFieldbook provides timely content that aims to help Cooperative Extension professionals consider the role of technology in their work, and perhaps increase the adoption of technology, particularly social media. The information in the eFieldbook provides both food for thought and practical information that will enable you to apply what you’ve learned and to take action. Topics include:

  • A series of perspective essays that explore the nature of technology in Cooperative Extension work and what the future may hold; 
  • An exploration of two featured technologies with case studies, including a newly created social intranet/audience engagement platform designed for Cooperative Extension, and a popular social media platform (Instagram); 
  • A section on leveraging the digital information – content – we already produce using technology, including resources about search engine optimization;
  • Suggested resources that will support your work; and
  • An ongoing series of blog posts to provide additional information to help you stay abreast of technology topics.

This eFieldbook is closely connected to visioning work underway at the eXtension Foundation. To help determine developing technologies that may impact Cooperative Extension through 2025, the eXtension Foundation has developed a futuring panel to explore future options. The panel is led by Jerry Thomas at The Ohio State University. The project’s goals are to:

  • Identify key emerging technologies that may impact Cooperative Extension;
  • Provide a context about how they may impact Cooperative Extension; and
  • Recommend policy and professional development options for Cooperative Extension.

The Using Digital Technology in Extension Education eFieldbook is available on the eFieldbook bookshelf at efieldbooks.extension.org, or can be found on the main navigation in Connect Extension at connect.extension.org. 

Curator/Editor:

  • Dr. Rose Hayden-Smith, eXtension Foundation Technology in Extension Education Fellow. Emeritus, Cooperative Extension, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR). 

Perspectives Contributors:

  • Greg Aronoff, Oregon State University
  • John Buzzard, Oregon State University
  • David J. Krause, Driscoll’s Berries
  • Dr. Mark Lubell, University of California, Davis
  • Dr. Lindsey Shirley, Oregon State University

Case Study Contributors

  • Dan Macon, M.A., UC ANR
  • Aaron Weibe, M.A., eXtension Foundation

Leveraging Content Contributors

  • ChaNaè Bradley, M.P.A., Fort Valley State University
  • Cynthia Kintigh, UC ANR
  • Liz Sizensky, UC ANR
  • Victor Villegas, Oregon State University

LinkedIn login is required to access the eFieldbooks. This is similar to using Google or Facebook to log in instead of setting up an account via email. If you do not have a LinkedIn account, you can register for one free here. The purpose of the LinkedIn login is to provide an encrypted ID to the eFieldbook so users can securely interact with that eFieldbook, take notes, and make contributions. The eXtension Foundation is not collecting your personal information. In order to receive notice updates from eXtension, we invite you to opt-in the first time you login to an eFieldbook by providing your desired email address.

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Results from the July 2020 Farm Journal Story Lead Contest

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In May, the eXtension Foundation launched a monthly story lead contest in partnership with Farm Journal in the Farm Journal Monthly Story Lead Contest subgroup here in Connect Extension. Monthly winners, along with their Extension Directors and Administrators, have the chance to work with Farm Journal to further develop their story and have it published in Farm Journal media. The topic area for the July 2020 contest was about how Extension is empowering farmers to maximize their use of data, equipment, and precision technology – especially as it relates to farm profitability, environmental impact, or innovation. We’d like to thank everyone that submitted a story lead for July 2020.

@Jason de Koff, Associate Professor & Extension Specialist, Tennessee State University submitted the winning story lead, Bringing Drone Technology Training to Tennessee Farmers.

Summary: In 2020, the Tennessee State University Cooperative Extension Program, led by Jason de Koff, engaged in multiple workshops across the state, working with over 140 farmers, to provide hands-on experiences in flying drones as well as instruction on the different uses, types of drones, and costs.  After the workshops, 98% of farmers indicated their knowledge of drones increased, 63% believed drones were not as difficult to fly as they had thought, and over 50% indicated an increase in their likelihood of purchasing a drone and getting their remote pilot certification in the next two years.

Congrats to Jason and Tennessee State University! We look forward to seeing the story published in Farm Journal.

August 2020 Contest

The August 2020 Story Lead Contest has been posted and is due on Friday, August 28th. For August 2020, Farm Journal would like to hear from you about an innovative research project, on-farm trial or farmer engagement program you or Extension is leading to help farmers measure, analyze and improve their soil health.  Learn More here

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Two Health Fellowship Positions Now Open, Deadline August 28 2020

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Position Funded by Molina Foundation
Position Administered by eXtension
Position Led by Roger Rennenkamp
The total amount of dollars available is $20,000.00, divided into two 10K contracts

Contract conditions and terms:

This will be a fixed term contract (so level of effort needs to be considered).  

20K is about 1 day a week of an Extension professional’s time for a year. 

This is for 2 Extension professionals – 10K each.      

Contract Timeline – 1 year – September 1, 2020-August 31, 2021.

Statement of Work for the Contract Effort

The work of the fellows will focus on building the capacity and expanding the portfolio of the Cooperative Extension System’s work focused on health and well being.  Much of this will be accomplished through a Connect Extension subgroup where fellows will work as a team to foster identification and sharing of programmatic resources, expertise and collaboration around priority themes determined by Roger Rennekamp. 

  • Engage Connect Extension group members weekly in planned activities such as learning circles, webinars, cafes, dialogs, and chat events. 
  • Create content that encourages engagement of members such as blog posts, forum questions and surveys. 
  • Develop a tagging vocabulary in Connect Extension to make resources easy to find. 
  • Design and host at least three national professional development online events to the Cooperative Extension System with eXtension; for example, an action dialog or a webinar.
  • Report monthly on group engagement to Roger Rennenkamp and Aaron Weibe.

Success in the Role

Measures of success include both an increase in membership and an increase in interaction among members of the Connect Extension subgroup.  Additionally, success may also be measured through documented evidence of resource sharing and collaborative efforts across members of the subgroup.  Spin-off groups focused on specific topics related to health and well being are also considered a positive outcome. The Kaiser Permanente Center for Public Health and Evaluation has conducted a baseline assessment of current capacity building and institutional support for work focused health and well being.  Data collected from a follow-up evaluation will compared to the baseline data to determine change on key variables.

Interested  Extension Professionals should send a letter of interest to Brenna Kotar.  ceoassistant@extension.org  by August 28.  Your letter of interest should describe why you are interested to help in this important work as well as your experience or academic background in health or the health education arena.  Letters of interest will be reviewed August 29, with selections made by August 30.

 

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Ask Extension Pilot Program

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The eXtension Foundation is seeking volunteers to pilot the upgraded Ask An Expert platform, dubbed Ask Extension, to test features and provide input on user experience for long term improvements. Historically, Ask An Expert has served Cooperative Extension as a digital outreach tool to connect millions of U.S. citizens with you – their local Extension experts. The upgraded Ask Extension provides significant improvements in terms of enhanced ability for clients to dialogue with the expert, create accounts to view their entire history of questions and answers, and for experts – expanded permissions to allow groups to control access to their questions. Experts and clients are also able to respond using email without having to log into the Ask Extension platform, making it more convenient for spontaneous responses. Further, the forms through which clients ask questions will reside on institutional or group websites, each carrying their own branding rather than through a central eXtension site.

To become a pilot group for the new Ask Extension upgrade , fill out the form and join us at https://askhelp.extension.org/become-a-pilot-group/

Background

eXtension’s Ask an Expert system began in 2006 as one of the core services provided to all land grant universities.  From the beginning, the underlying technology has remained the same, although a number of enhancements were deployed over time. For many Extension programs, this has served as a key educational outreach tool in responding to specific individual educational needs. In the past 14 years, this system was created, hosted, and serviced by eXtension application developers. This has resulted in the creation of a repository of a half-million questions, answered by more than 7,700 experts. Many of these questions are available to the general public to search. In 2019 ask.extension.org received almost 10,000,000 unique pageviews, and for the peak summer season, 1,160 experts handle about 11,000 questions per month.

To leverage this important national digital asset, eXtension launched two new projects with funding from its USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Ag Extension cooperative agreement. ,  Building an artificial intelligence platform that provides information from a wide range of Extension educational resources, and  modernizing the current Ask an Expert system. 

Over the past 10 months, the eXtension Engineering Team including Mark Locklear, Ben MacNeill, and Larry Lippke, along with a team of current Ask an Expert users from several institutions, have been working with staff from Eduworks to design and develop the replacement Ask an Expert component, known as Ask Extension.  In June this team of users alpha-tested and provided quite valuable feedback. Indeed, there are more, mostly administrative changes that remain to be done, but we are ready to begin the next pilot phase of the testing and rollout of Ask Extension.  

Since the beginning of Ask an Expert, there have been two primary gateways through which the public has been able to ask questions. One is the very broad, general interface currently available at https://ask.extension.org. With this gateway, questions are directed to experts based primarily on the subject of the question and the location of the customer. The second gateway is through group-specific widgets that are embedded on group websites.  For example, several states have chosen to deploy county specific widgets on county Extension websites, in which all questions are directed to county Extension educators within those respective counties. In other cases, a subject matter department (e.g., horticulture, entomology, etc.) may have a widget on its departmental website, inviting questions specific to that respective subject matter.

Current Pilot Details

In this upcoming phase of the rollout of Ask Extension we are looking for groups using widgets who are willing to engage in our pilot test. This first phase entails our working with individual groups and updating their existing widgets to receive questions in the new system. This approach allows us to test the scaling of the new system and work out any interface and workflow issues experts might encounter. We are also looking for new groups that do not yet use such widgets but would like to give it a try. You can view an example of this widget at https://askhelp.extension.org/widget-demo/.

If your group is interested in participating in this first phase, we’ll provide new widget code to be installed on your site. When questions are submitted via this new widget they will be processed in the new system. Your group might still get questions in the existing Ask an Expert system if the questions come in through the broad ask.extension.org gateway or if they are reassigned by someone to your group. This means your experts may potentially need to work in both systems during this pilot. But, all the work done in the new system can be considered permanent; i.e., all questions asked and answered will remain and become part of the permanent repository when the full rollout is complete.

Next Steps

More information about Ask Extension and the planned transition to this new system is available at https://askhelp.extension.org. But we specifically invite you to apply to be a pilot group by completing the form at https://askhelp.extension.org/become-a-pilot-group/. After you’ve submitted your information we will follow up to discuss the next steps for your group prior to going live in the new system. We look forward to working with you on this transition.

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Connect Extension Weekly Digest: August 3, 2020

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All Cooperative Extension professionals are invited to join Connect Extension. To register your free account, click here. 

Impact Collaborative Opportunities for eXtension Members. Next month, the Impact Collaborative will be an Innovation Facilitator Training. The Innovation Facilitator training is six sessions on August 17, 19, 21, 24, 26, & 28. It helps provide individuals with a new way of looking at program and project development to help new and existing programs across your states and institutions identify gaps in their planning, ensure they are most ready for implementation, and have explored all considerations to maximize local impact. Learn more and register here. 

If you have questions regarding eXtension membership, please contact membership@eXtension.org. 

ICYMI: Recent Posts

Connect Extension Podcast Now Available
Aaron Weibe, Communication & Engagement Manager, eXtension FoundationThe eXtension Foundation is pleased to announce that our Connect Extension Podcast is now available! Each month in Connect Extension, eXtension hosts a virtual chat on a different topic area to highlight best practices and innovations throughout Cooperative Extension…Learn More

Virtual National Tribal & Indigenous Climate Conference
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Best Thing You’ve Shared Recently?
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Natural Hazards Workshop
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Impact Collaborative Opportunities for eXtension Members
A listing of Current eXtension Members Available Here
Investing In Community Resilience: Moving From Knowledge to Action (Learning Circle)
August 12th, 2020, 3 PM – 4 PM ET

Connect with philanthropy and Extension professionals for an interactive learning circle to discuss the concepts explored in the third and fourth webinars of the Investing in Community Resilience series…Learn More
Innovation Facilitator Training
August 17, 19, 21, 24, 26, 28
1 PM – 3 PM ET

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Learn Calendar Events
Available to All Cooperative Extension Professionals
Managing Predators with a Small or Backyward Poultry Flock
August 4th, 2020, 3 PM – 4:30 PM ETWhen raising chickens, predators can be a serious issue – whether you live in a rural or urban area. We have put together a panel of specialists from different parts of the country to discuss how to handle predator problems…Learn More

 
How to Solarize a Tunnel/Hoop House
August 6th, 2020, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM ETAfter registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting…Learn More
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This website is supported in part by New Technologies for Ag Extension (funding opportunity no. USDA-NIFA-OP-010186), grant no. 2023-41595-41325 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Extension Foundation.

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