By Kristal Leebrick
The Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics is expanding its online learning offerings this year through the University of Minnesota’s partnership with Coursera.
Professor Jacob Jungers and Teaching Specialist Hannah Stoll will launch the first two courses this spring.
Coursera is an online learning platform that partners with more than 350 universities and companies to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials that includes courses, specializations, professional certificates, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees. UMN has been expanding its Coursera listings, and Jungers and Stoll plan to add two specializations to the growing list: Agronomy for a Sustainable Future and Data-Driven Agriculture. The latter is part of a Digital Agriculture certificate, which is a joint venture with APG and the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society in the College of Liberal Arts.
Specializations—a package of courses on a specific topic—are new to Coursera, said Jungers. A specialization is what Coursera refers to as a “micro- credential” that could lead to a certificate. The APG specializations will contain five to six courses each.
Current students, faculty, and staff at the U have free access to courses in the Coursera for Minnesota program (though MasterTrack Certificates are not part of that perk). Those from outside the University have to pay a fee to take a course or earn a certificate or degree through the program.
Though it is not the driving factor for getting APG courses online through Coursera, “it is potentially a way to generate revenue,” Jungers said. Enrollments of each Coursera course can be seen online, and in the agro- ecology-type courses offered by larger universities, “some will have 50,000 to 60,000 students who have taken it. If it’s generating $50 per student, that’s a lot of
money,” he said.
Another benefit is students from all over the world can enroll in these classes. There aren’t many online agronomy resources, Stoll said, and the Coursera offerings can be “a much more affordable way for people to learn more targeted things in agronomy
without needing a bachelor’s degree in agronomy.”
The first two courses to go live are part of the Agronomy for a Sustainable Future specialization, Forages and The Agroecosystem. Stoll’s background is in plant breeding and genetics, which is requiring some learning on her part to develop the course materials, She sees that as beneficial, as it’s helped her put the information into an accessible format for students.
Much of the content for the Forages course has come from lectures and the work of recently retired Professor Craig Sheaffer, who has been involved in the reworking of the content. “Almost all of the original content is parsed from 10 different lectures that Craig has given,” Stoll said. “I’ve been condensing them because he could probably teach three upper-level courses on
forages alone, but it needs to be condensed into a level [for] somebody who just needs more of a casual understanding rather than an in-depth understanding of things.”
The plan is to complete both specializations by the end of the year with the overarching goal of reaching a broader range of learners—“not just students who enrolled at the University of Minnesota and CFANS,” Jungers said. “Hopefully, it [will] encourage other learners around the world to come to the University of Minnesota to pursue a major in this topic. That’s the goal.”
And for faculty reading about the new APG Coursera courses, the material will be available to use in their own courses. Stoll and Jungers are developing the material to be modular, so it can be brought into other courses easily.