Abstract:

Researchers, technicians and rural extension in Brazil are constantly faced with the need to better understand the reality and the adverse contexts of the communities with which they interact. These professionals require new action strategies that are capable of improving the level of interaction between different actors. A viable alternative is to develop continuing education programs with an emphasis on non-formal education, which provide opportunities for new learning. However, without losing focus on the reality of the target audience of technology transfer actions and extension. This is the core of this research which aims the establishment of a non-formal education program through microtraining facing the dissemination of information via mobile devices. This implies to produce microcontents and offer microtraining for researchers, extension workers and technicians who work in the areas of technology transfer and extension. This research is based on the didactic and pedagogical processes and content production, and technology transfer policy of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) and Anater (National Agency for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension). Such processes provide innovative contributions from exchanges and intersubjectivities, including the understanding of when and how individuals learn. The research hypothesis is that individual learning contribute to occur collective and organizational learning. These promote the advancement of knowledge of both companies about themselves, as those areas of knowledge for which the institution is committed to the search for answers to questions. Given the nature of the study, was adopted as a method participatory research. Thus, in addition to rural researchers and extension workers, applicants are also considered subject, given the condition of legitimate representatives of the research object of the problem situation. Data collection will be conducted through semi-structured interviews, document analysis, focus groups, participant observation and questionnaire. The microcontents for microtraining shall be elaborated based on appropriate methodology for the production of educational microcontent for mobile devices. The continuing education program of non-formal education, by mobile devices, will be offered in a web computing environment based on mobile application development concepts, visualization, and ubiquitous computing. Testing and validation of computational tools and the environment will be conducted through data analysis using descriptive statistics and graphing, parametric and / or nonparametric tests.

Keywords:

Non-formal education, continuing education, mobile learning, microlearning, microtraining, microcontents, mobile devices, transfer technology, research project.