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A Review of Policy Directions for E-Extension at the Land Grants:
Pre-Proposal Submitted to the Kellogg Foundation
E-Extension has arrived. The 21st century extension vision document, the ECOP committee, Kellogg reports and a variety of related activity make it clear. These high level planning efforts seek to promote, coordinate and fund this new strategy to deliver content to the public. The internet and the web have joined film, radio, TV and other technologies used by extension in the past century.
Ideally such planning would have been well underway by now. If it were not for the red flags raised by rural access issues, shifting web standards, and declining funding, it would be. There are some advantages that the system lingered. Planning can be formulated now based on the track record of almost a decade of the early adopters. The technologies involved are more mature too. It is often wise to get in at mid-stream and after all, many years of e-extension lie ahead.
Still, the system probably lost something in waiting so long to formulate national policies. Extension might have enjoyed more visibility, established online brands, and a unified content base by now. Surely we did not capture much of the prestige and funding that early adopters enjoy and are rewarded for. Recent policy documents stress the need to develop a brand but is much harder now to stake out territory than it was 3-5 years ago. Ten years of uncoordinated web development have to be dealt with to unify existing content. There were costs to 'wait and see.'
Another cost is the starting point for this proposed review: A more mature e-extension policy may have had a considerable impact helping land grants position and renew themselves in the very challenging climate we now face. This is not meant to belabor the past but to help set the stage for the future. Land Grants need to get current planning right--and to do it quickly--to insure that the historic opportunity ahead of us is captured. With the funding crisis all land grants face, the decline of our traditional clients, the emergence of other information providers, the competition for our students (via distance education), and other well-known dark clouds on the horizon, incomplete planning might have genuinely serious effects. Tardy planning might find the institutions for which it planned to no longer have the same mission and funding levels. We have the resources to do it within the next few years; perhaps not beyond.
How complete is the planning? Surely all the key facts, issues, and alternatives should be on the planning table, but a preliminary review of recent policy documents do not make this clear.
For example, are policy-makers analyzing the facts offered by the ten year old history of e-extension. We need to leverage our history on the web in planning our future on the web.
Land Grants are intended as integrated institutions but the fact is that the world of residential instruction is not all that overlapping with the world of extension and of research. The barriers between these three pillars of the land grant are not new but it is interesting that they are now reflected in web pages too. There is the issue of how to capture the opportunities and synergies of integrating the online worlds of residential instruction, research and outreach.
A related issue to consider is the trend towards a campus-centric approach to land grant outreach. It is a hard issue but there is no way that we can fail to consider integration of extension content with campus content in order to provide single point of contact and powerful searchability for our clients and stake-holders.
Naturally yet higher levels of integration need to be considered too: aggregation of content across land grants into regional and national collections. There is even the issue of contributing content to a world agricultural library maintained by FAO or other suitable body. If we are not considering these issues we are missing a chance to participate in discussions and projects that are going on in other disciplines.
Archiving of e-content is a key issue too. Archivists still shy away from e-archives yet many outreach products are only in such form. Extension services probably do a better job of maintaining an inventory of physical equipment then in maintaining complete archives of e-content. Is there a national plan being prepared. There are even legal issues to consider on meeting requirements of funding sources to archive products. These archives could very well be a key part of organizational knowledge-bases too that--combined with other organization knowledge--help maintain institutional memory, support everyday workflow and support strategic planning.
All these can be subsumed by the biggest issue that does not seem to be more than a blip on the land grant radar, the highly visible trend called institutional repositories. For example, the DSpace project is building an institutional repository for public use, aiming at posting as much of their content as possible. Extension services and land grants routinely post free, online content, but the DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm. Will the extension service create institutional repositories too? How far do the land grants go? DSpace, Merlot, and other 'open content' efforts cannot help but appear as paradigmatic land grant projects. But we're apparently not at the table.
Admittedly, the open content issue poses an awkward question for land grants. There are great opportunities for e-extension but without dedicated new funds to pursue them and at a time when existing budgets are declining. It gets worse. Funding the initial creation of repositories is high enough and long-term maintenance must be budgeted too. Pursuing the goal also means losing revenues; cost recovery from the sale of print publications will decrease as the same materials become available online. Cost-recovery is a funding strategy that is clearly on the minds of committee members and writers on e-extension given discussion and development of "business models" for e-extension.
One looks to the federal government to help in more ways than additional funding. For example, there is no master index of available online content from the land grants, no way to search or browse the publicly funded content now up. Different document formats and standards are used to post holdings. There is duplication and redundancy of holdings.
Another problem is that needed content is too often locked behind password boxes or sold at a fee. Surprisingly, the demands of cost recovery slow down or block the dissemination of traditional print publications to the Web at Land Grants. A related trend is the password protecting of course Web pages, allowing only registered students to view sites.
In the earlier days of the Web, lecture notes were often freely available to citizens. More recently, Extension content like the Agronomy Handbook site has been used in college and high school agronomy courses. Surely it is ideal when content does double-duty of this kind, serving both students and citizens.
It is worth observing that the digital divide is not just a chasm between the connected and the unconnected. Once connected, the next chasm is between those that can pay to access content and those that cannot. It is a tragedy when a citizen seeks basic existing knowledge on the Web without success. Land grant universities need to coordinate online outreach to provide knowledge on demand to citizens.
We need to build a distributed digital library of outreach holdings, a citizen knowledge-base. Such an effort is consistent with the goals of the National Information Infrastructure, Internet 2, and Next Generation Internet. Tremendous gains in bandwidth and in access are coming soon, yet similar gains need to be made in planning and organizing the content, especially public content. By continuing to create outreach resources in uncoordinated fashion, we are effectively worsening information overload rather than alleviating it. Search engines will not solve the problem by returning thousands of documents that match a keyword.
Another issue is that content is more than full text but also tools that work content. calculators, GIS, and other projects are sprouting up. Digital libraries of e-extension can include suites of these tools.
We need to look at the education mission, dividing it up in to key components of general, specialized and continuing, looking how we can provide clients greater value, building synergies in-between
Data gathering is another issue. Everyone has done surveys and the ubiquitous focus group, but are these being combined into a meta-analysis of extension clients? Bench-marking too. What are other countries doing? Global organizations like the FAO?
It is not clear that a integrated and full-fledged strategic planning effort is underway that covers all the bases. While systems thinking has been widely promoted in the land grants over the past decade, it is not clear we are doing it as we plan e-extension.
It is an exciting time for land grants as e-extension moves ahead, but we should not limit planning and vision especially at this key juncture.
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