E-LEARNING EXPERIENCES ON THE AGRO-FOOD TRAINING AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER IN ANDALUSIA. SPAIN

Training activities and technology transfer are essential requirements for effectiveness, competitiveness and viability of agro-food productive sectors. The Institute of Training and Research of Agriculture and Fishery (IFAPA), which depends on the Andalusia Government, is developing several activities to Andalusia Agriculture and Fishery modernization and correctly implementation of Common Agricultural Policy directives.

The training program given by IFAPA could be divided into two groups, according to the origin of the demand of the training activity. The first one is Institutional Training that involves training activities coming from institutional demands. It is usually a necessary condition to undertake determined tasks, to receive certain public aid, or to respond to institutional compromises assumed by the administration. The second one is Training Specialized. This is directed toward farmers, workers and technicians through technology transfer, based on the results of their own or other research or other sources of knowledge. It has a technical specialized character and its general aim is to improve the response capacity of the rural environment to any changes, facilitating access to available information and applicable to decision making.

The IFAPA training tools and resources include edition of didactic material, class-room learning, practical training, meetings and seminars and recently e-learning has been incorporated due to the usefulness of the ICT for the agro-food sector. In 2008, a total of 756 training activities were carried out by the IFAPA, with a total of 41.931 teaching hours and 20.413 students (15.989 man and 4.424 women). The on-line activities involved 10 % of the IFAPA training.

Nowadays the IFAPA e-learning platform offers training courses about pesticide application, irrigation and sustainable water use, soil managements and fishing tackles. Both, e-learning platform and courses have been specially designed attending to the usability and accessibility of our target students and looking for the interactivity between students and PC, through practical examples and simulations for decision making. Others tools, such as mail and forum are promoted by tutoring in order to enhance the communications and experiences sharing between students. On-line courses tutors also must support update contents and help student’s auto-learning.

The future expectative is an increase of this type of training, due to the major demand by the sector and a major offer and development of IFAPA e-learning platform, since others course about animal welfare, friendly agriculture or agrarian enterprises economy will be available shortly.