Agricultural education teacher preparation programs constantly attempt to keep pace with 21st-century agriculture and provide relevant pedagogical and content training for pre-service teachers. The National Research Council urged land-grant universities to focus on the needs and demands of students. This study aimed to identify Iowa State…

State crop scouting competitions (CSCs) promote agriculture by introducing youths in Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska to various agricultural disciplines while focusing on integrated pest management (IPM). High school students compete as teams to address crop management issues at various stations. Each station is led by university representatives. Two…

The six Land Grant colleges and universities across the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota State, South Dakota State, and Iowa State) all faced unprecedented challenges in the 1890s. The economic depression brought on by the Panic of 1893 saw budget cutbacks and lean times, but the "McKinley Prosperity," combined…

Global demand is increasing for food, feed, and fiber; for additional agricultural outputs, such as biofuels; and for ecosystem services, such as clean water and outdoor recreation. In response, new agricultural enterprises are needed that produce more outputs from existing lands while meeting the "triple bottom line" of high performance…

Academic departments regularly offer dual-listed courses in which one course has two course numbers, yet are taught in the same place, at the same time, by a single instructor, and in one department to undergraduate and graduate students. While universities discourage their use by subjecting such courses to more rigorous approval processes,…

During the twentieth-century, American engineers harnessed the atom, sent men to the moon, and literally reshaped the world. They re-routed rivers to create giant hydroelectric dams, created a massive and interconnected highway system, and designed skyscrapers, jets, computers, and the internet. As a modern profession, engineering boasted strong…

In January 2003, the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF) contacted land grant universities in Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington to involve them in a program initiative to address rural poverty. After a strategic planning process, NWAF had shifted from traditional grant making to operating programs that…

Extension is experiencing a trend toward closer alignment of its programs serving families and youth, notably Family and Consumer Sciences and 4-H Youth Development. Projects are more multidisciplinary and comprehensive than in the past, and, in many states, FCS and 4-HYD are also becoming more administratively integrated. Several reasons for this…

We explain in this article the need for board training in rural America irrespective of industry or government sector. We discuss how an assessment of training needs has led to the launch of a new project called the National Board Basics Curriculum (NBBC) project. In this project, we have identified four key core competencies that every board…

With soaring uncertainty surrounding the financing of public higher education, institutions are faced with developing strategies that will enable them to effectively compete for state funding. One component to cultivating resources and relationships for colleges and universities are through government relations organizations. Utilized for…

In 1994 the Ford Foundation launched the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) as a "national demonstration project to help community colleges in distressed regions move their people and communities toward prosperity. It challenged community colleges to become catalysts for economic development and supported aggressive efforts to increase…

Based on compelling financial and strategic reasons, Iowa State University replaced its paper viewbook with a CD-ROM digital viewbook following the Fall 1998 recruiting cycle. The first interactive DVD viewbook debuted for the Fall 2003 recruiting cycle, following a qualitative research study designed to gauge the effectiveness of the medium.…

The opinions of 1,585 Iowa farmers about 8 emergent agricultural technologies (energy production from feed grains and oils; energy production from livestock waste; genetic engineering research on plants, livestock, and humans; robotics for on-farm use; confinement livestock facilities; and personal computers for farm families) were found to be…

This study was designed to measure instructional design competencies as a result of participation in a 9-month Web-based training program called "Roadmap to Effective Distance Education Instructional Design." The researchers used a self-assessment pre- and posttest to determine participant initial and final competence in 12 areas: adult…

The extent to which conditions and experiences of the farm crisis have tempered or shaped farm operators' opinions about the role of the scientific community in economic development through university-industry linkages is examined in this paper. Eleven Likert-type items, designed to ascertain how these linkages are viewed, were included in the…