Education & Workforce Development
Our Institute’s approach to EWD aims to produce educational materials and training programs and to facilitate knowledge transfer and the adoption of best practices in AI in CSAF. We will accomplish this by developing modular educational materials focused on AI and CSAF that we will couple with existing delivery channels, tailored and packaged for specific target audiences. These modules will be pilot tested and used in multiple organized cohorts, including training undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to use AI to address climate change challenges, and secondary school teachers and their students. We will co-develop AI-inspired decision tools with agricultural and forestry practitioners, service providers, farmers, and ranchers to train them in their use to mitigate GHGs and increase operations and land resiliency. Our specific plans include:
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1) Plans for mentoring and professional development of participants:
To train the next generation of AgFoAI leaders, we will provide coordinated mentoring and professional development of participants through cohorts of undergraduate students in courses and graduate students and postdocs working at the project, providing mentorship opportunities and building professional networks across member institutions. We will organize a monthly colloquium series featuring presentations from national and international thought leaders, providing students opportunities to develop skills in science communications, media relations, systems thinking, project management, and leadership. CSAF and AI scholars will jointly advise graduate students and organize a journal club to help students to stay abreast of current AgFoAI debates, state of the art and knowledge gaps. And we will seek summer internship opportunities and job fairs with industry and government laboratories for students.
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2) Integration of research with education:
We will engage students in research and discovery via open houses and providing access to a monthly AgFoAI colloquium, and public parts of annual meetings. We will offer a freshman AgFoAI seminar to engage them in the CSAF grand challenges. Via UROP, REUs, honors courses, and MS capstone projects, students will participate in a foundational AI or use
inspired research theme or an integrative AgFoAI research project (Table 1) or associated tool development to productize the research. Ph.D. students will work on a research project in the first semester AgFoAI course, read AgFoAI research papers in the second semester journal club, and will have the choice to choose Ph.D. research topics aligned with AI themes or integrative AgFoAI projects. Furthermore, the research results and datasets (e.g., CSAF_ImageNet benchmark) will be incorporated into undergraduate and graduate courses by developing and publishing pedagogical material, laboratory exercises and reading lists.
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3) Undergraduate and graduate student education:
We will refine and teach existing courses on digital agriculture and CSAF at all our universities. The courses will encompass interdisciplinary approaches to AI-inspired research, concepts, theories, and methods to address climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture and forestry. We will design new AgFoAI minors for undergraduates without lengthening host degrees, and create AgFoAI specializations in our current degree programs. We will also present our efforts at national conferences.
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4) Workforce education and training for professionals:
A strong emphasis is our connection to farmers, foresters, and other working professionals and landowners, who will ultimately utilize and benefit from our project’s tools and research. Three efforts will reflect this emphasis. First, we will leverage existing and new curriculum from the Colorado State University (CSU) Carbon Farm Planning program, COMET-Planner, Climate Smart programs at the Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP), and Cornell’s Climate Smart Farming Program to develop a new online course to train farmers, forest owners, and technical service providers (such as Certified Crop Advisors) on CSAF and AI tools. We will routinely incorporate new tools and training on their use into the course, and practitioners will provide input on their needs and tool usefulness throughout development. We will connect with diverse agriculture and forestry stakeholders through CSU and Cornell programs, Delaware State University (DSU) Extension, MCAP, and Purdue’s Center for Commercial Agriculture and the Agronomy e-Learning Academy. Second, to reach farmers, forest owners, and agricultural service providers, we will develop AgFoAI stand-alone learning modules that can be incorporated into existing Extension training programs, such as Purdue’s Agronomy e-Learning Academy, which has a five-year record of success and over 2,300 course completions. These modules will include short (5–10 minute) professionally produced, edited, and annotated video segments with closed captioning, accompanied by readings, graphics, links to further reading, and online assessments. Third, we will organize AgFoAI sessions at agricultural conferences, such as TechHubLIVE, the Intl. Conf. for Precision Agriculture, nitrogen use efficiency workshops, InfoAg, and state crop and animal production meetings attended by farmers and agribusiness professionals.
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5) Professional development for grade 6–12 teachers:
We will collaborate with grade 6-12 science curricula coordinators in each of our states to invite secondary school teachers to participate in our professional training workshops. Leveraging their experience and the workshop content, teachers will develop a lesson plan, aligned with state standards, and implement lessons in their classrooms. Afterwards, they will provide a reflection of the student learning outcome. Teachers can receive professional development credits from their school for annual evaluation. We will join partners (e.g., National Assoc. of Agricultural Educators and National Ag in the Classroom) to engage science and agricultural instructors to integrate new AgFoAI digital content and activities into established curricula.
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6) Engagement with grade 6–12 students and the public:
We will further engage directly with secondary students by developing youth STEM camp activities and career exploration opportunities. We will leverage the UMN Day Technology Camp, which engages 6th–8th grade students (about 100/year for 14 years) in fun AI and CSAF activities. We will also leverage the existing UMN Summer Computing Academy, a program for nearly 60 female secondary students, that teaches the foundations of computing. We will provide an AgFoAI session at the annual 4-H Career Explorations Conference at Cornell (and similar opportunities in CO, IN, and DE), where nearly 500 4-H youth attend immersive STEM experiences exploring future education and career opportunities. These activities will help build teens’ knowledge of AgFoAI and increase their confidence to pursue AgFoAI careers. Students from underrepresented groups will be actively recruited and mentored.
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7) Evaluation and Assessment of EWD:
An independent evaluator with NSF experience will carry out a holistic evaluation with annual surveys of the courses and professional education and outreach activities and provide analysis for continuous improvement. We will also gather metrics such as the numbers of students reached (secondary, undergrad, graduate); professionals (e.g., farmers, agricultural service providers, agrobusiness employees) and public engaged; K-12 teachers reached; and internships, job offers, employer visits, and awards provided.