Online Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in International Agroecology Education.

Agroecology seeks to provide context specific, transdisciplinary solutions to food system problems. To train future agroecologists in context, instructors have relied on experiential learning techniques that brought the student out of the classroom into the environment under study; however, as the emphasis has moved from the farm scale to the global scale, it has become more difficult to place students in authentic contexts for study because of financial and logistical reasons. One answer to this problem is the use of online GIS combined with stakeholder driven, digital open-ended case studies. In the 2012 Fall Semester, instructors in Agronomy and Plant Genetics built an online GIS and implemented it in the Agroecosystems of the World course. Journal responses were collected and analyzed to gauge the students’ perception of the effectiveness of the technology.