e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture

The development of ICT and the Internet in the last decade has revolutionized almost all areas of social and professional life evoking fundamental changes on today's educational practice and leading to the introduction of innovative methods of teaching and learning. Due to their massive use, ICT technologies allow people empowerment in the ability to learn, favouring a spontaneous tendency to assume a meta-knowledge and learning. The information is updated every second, and every person, regardless of age and occupation is being forced to learn and continuously improve his/her knowledge. In such framework, the e-learning approach is becoming an important tool to allow the flexibility and quality requested. In agriculture and fisheries information is a critical resource in the operation and management of organizations. Timely availability of relevant information is vital for effective performance of managerial functions such as planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Information within the hands of the farmers means empowerment through control over their resources and decision-making processes. They noted that being an effective and efficient delivery system of essential information and technology services, it facilitates the clients' critical role in decision-making towards improved agricultural production, processing, trading, and marketing. However, in order to develop sustaining agricultural systems of e-learning it is required to adapt standards which facilitate an interaction of different components for the development, presentation, and management of agricultural learning contents. Thus, with a plethora of e-learning providers and solutions available in the market, a new problem is faced by agricultural organizations consisting in the selection of the most suitable e-learning suite. The paper discusses the technological issues, by means of the current advances on video streaming over IP and the development of HDTV e-learning content, as well as the present state of standardization and its application in agriculture. Also, it describes the characteristics of the fundamental macro components of a typical e-learning system, namely, the Learning Management System (LMS), the Learning Content Management System (LCMS), the Knowledge Management System (KMS), and the Virtual Environment (VE) for agricultural teaching and services associated with it. An efficient system must be able to integrate into oneself all these components so that they can efficaciously interact with each other. Besides, it is necessary that such platforms make reporting data services available, so as to allow accurate analyses on activities carried out by users. Having identifying the various advantages of e-learning, the Agricultural University of Athens initiated a Leaning Support Centre (LSC), to which teachers can upload e-learning modules so that students would have free access to course related additional learning resources. Educational practice is expected to change from a pedagogical approach closed, tightly controlled by the teacher, in an open, transparent, integrated in society, with parents and community involvement that supports student initiative, facilitating collaboration, personal skills and lifelong learning. To this aid, it is important to provide the necessary technical assistance to interesting academic staff members to develop good quality e-learning resources.