Purdue Agronomy eLearning Academy celebrates ten years of serving agriculture
When agribusiness leaders expressed a need for professional development courses to enhance their employees’ knowledge of agronomy topics, Purdue answered the call by starting its Agronomy eLearning Academy. Ten years later, and more than 2,600 students from every state and 48 countries, the online program is still going strong.
As a district seed representative for DEKALB/Asgrow, Alex Beck is a go-to expert for information on the company’s products and a source of agronomic recommendations to help farmers succeed, grow more bushels and be more profitable.
He’s also someone who is serious about continuous learning. That made Beck and Purdue University’s Agronomy eLearning Academy a natural pairing when he went looking to enhance his knowledge of agronomy in general and nutrient management and precision agriculture in particular.
Beck is among more than 2,600 learners from all 50 states plus Puerto Rico and 48 countries worldwide who have taken courses from the Agronomy eLearning Academy since Purdue’s College of Agriculture introduced the fully online program 10 years ago.
Learn more about Purdue’s Agronomy eLearning Academy
“The program from Purdue has tremendous flexibility, allowing you to complete it around a busy work schedule, and it’s from a school that has tremendous credibility in agriculture,” said Beck, whose family raises corn, soybeans, alfalfa and beef cattle on 510 acres in eastern Iowa.
In addition to the U.S., students have come from Africa, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, among other places. There are forms of agriculture that make the program applicable basically everywhere, said Purdue Professor Bruce Erickson, who started and still oversees the Agronomy eLearning Academy.
Bruce Erickson, PhD., Agronomy Education Distance Outreach Director
Besides the original Agronomy Essentials course, the program now includes Precision Agriculture, added in 2016, Nutrient Management in 2017 and Agronomy Essentials Europe in 2020. Precision Agriculture is getting a remake as Digital Agriculture, accommodating such topics as artificial intelligence, automation and robotics, and there are plans for a new Soils Essentials course and maybe one covering farm management and economics.
“When I found Purdue’s Agronomy eLearning Academy it was exactly what I was looking for,” said Karlee Rauschenberger, a former schoolteacher whose family started farming 650 acres in North Dakota two years ago. “I went from attending crop tours and feeling like I had little to no understanding of what was going on to being able to engage and ask questions. Each course and module has benefited our farming operation.”
The number of people taking the courses and their geographical diversity are marks of the program’s success, as is the diversity of their jobs and careers. Farmers go through the program, sure, but it regularly attracts employees, for instance, from seed, fertilizer and agricultural service companies, as well as wineries, food companies, commodity traders, companies that write agricultural insurance policies, and more.
“I think the best part of this program is the wide breadth of people that take it,” said Sue Bennett, who administers and markets the program today. “They’re from all over. They do all kinds of things. We have educators and learners from other institutions that take a course to fill in the gaps they have. I think that’s pretty incredible.”
Béla Kocsy, agricultural attaché at the Embassy of Hungary, said taking the Agronomy Essentials Course was like a kid eating chocolate — he couldn’t stop.
“After the first one, I did all the other parts and am I so glad I did,” said Kocsy, who earned his Crop Professional Certificate by completing all the academy’s courses. “I also spread the word in (Washington) D.C. with my agricultural counselors about how valuable it was to understanding U.S. agriculture.”
The Agronomy eLearning Academy began because Purdue had been hearing from partners it worked with in the agricultural service industry that some people they hired needed more skills in basic agronomy and farming. A century ago, half the Midwest population lived on farms and those employees would often have come from a farm background, but that had become less common.
“They wanted some basic courses that would help their staff that worked in the field and worked in other areas of the company, labs and sales and so on, who needed more agronomy education, more soils education, and precision ag was an up and coming thing,” said Purdue Professor Joseph Anderson, head of the Agronomy Department at the time.
Anderson asked then-Dean Jay Akridge for two years of funding to start the program and the college agreed to take a chance. They then needed someone to get the Agronomy eLearning Academy off the ground. Enter Erickson, who Anderson met when Erickson was a PhD student. Erickson had a doctorate in agronomic education and had developed courses for Purdue and for organizations including the American Society of Agronomy.
With Erickson on board, they organized a key meeting with industry stakeholders at a hotel near the Indianapolis airport, to get the stakeholders’ buy-in and work out what should be included in the curriculum. After that, Erickson started putting the program together.
The prospective students weren’t people who could pull up stakes and come to campus and it was not something the Extension Service team was equipped to handle at the time, so it was obvious that the program was going to have to be online.
Years before the pandemic made the systematic development of online programs standard practice at Purdue, developing the Agronomy eLearning Academy was not a turnkey operation. Video was to be a key aspect of the courses, for example, and Erickson basically had to turn himself into a producer, with help from savvy students who were creating videos for Purdue’s athletic teams and Hall of Music at the time. Purdue had new green screen rooms for recording, but video quality was not what corporate clients were expecting. They made numerous modifications, adding a second camera and additional lighting, using a lapel microphone instead of the boom mic and adding confidence monitors on the sides.
“And he built it as he flew it, literally,” Bennett said.
Said Erickson: “I was under extreme pressure to launch on time. We started offering the first course before we had it finished.”
They advertised in printed agriculture publications, reached out to company contacts, sent out mass emails to generate students and — it worked.
“I was actually very pleased with our first set of enrollments and then it continued to increase and became a steady stream of people,” Anderson said.
Anderson said he thought Purdue might saturate the market after five years or so, but the program continues to be popular, driven by need and Purdue’s reputation as a top agriculture school, word of mouth, a strong Google and social media presence, and Bennett’s constant courting of existing and potential customers.
“There’s still a significant market out there of people that we could help,” Bennett said.
Said Erickson: “Farmers and agribusiness people need to know how a corn plant grows. They need to know how nutrients exist in the soil. They need to know basic pest management principles. They need to know the environmental consequences of their actions. They need to know the context of the decisions that they’re making. With artificial intelligence coming on strong, we’re in danger of making decisions without having them wrapped in the proper context. That’s every field. It’s not just agriculture.”