Reusable Learning Objects To Increase Public's Awareness About Soybean Production.

A Reusable Learning Object (RLO) is a stand-alone learning tool designed to focus on a singular learning objective. For this research project, undergraduate agronomy club members and soybean board scholars developed RLO's to educate the public and to promote outreach to various audiences about current soybean production topics.  The RLO was to write educational objectives based upon Bloom's cognitive domain.  The RLO's included videos, PowerPoint slides, PDF's, and assessments. A teaching researcher worked with the students to construct the RLO learning objectives. The agronomy club students included their farming backgrounds and experiences to help explain to the public about the uses and benefits of soybeans.  A pilot test occurred summer of 2013 to a group of incoming freshmen (n=26) within the first year college program. The students were given the Soybean RLO assessment as a peer-review assignment to build their constructive criticism skills. Feedback was obtained about how informative the information was based on a Likert scale of 1.0 to 4.0 (4.0 is very informative).  The general results showed an average a 3.0 with moderately informative RLOs and the importance of the information was a 3.0 which was very important.  For the feedback for the overall quality ranking, the information was based on a Likert scale of 1.0 to 5.0 (5.0 is excellent). Thus, the overall quality ranking showed a 4.0 (4.0 was very good). Overall, the RLO’s documented effectiveness when utilized for teaching a freshman population class and it provided future feedback for improvements for the RLOs that can be modified by the students.  Therefore, this was one low-cost method of helping students gain professional development while gaining cognitive skills.