MSU researchers given grant to study in Africa

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African farmers and organizations involved in agriculture soon will be able to share, manage and expand their knowledge because of a team of MSU researchers.

The 18-month AgShare Open Education Resources pilot project will focus on increasing access to virtual resources, such as digitized books, for African agricultural universities, farmers and nongovernmental organizations, said Christine Geith, the project’s lead researcher and assistant provost and executive director of MSU Global Learning Ventures.

The team received a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund the project.

“When I was asked to do a ‘lay of the land’ report for open educational resources in agriculture, the report indicated a real lack of openly licensed curriculum resources in agriculture, particularly made by Africans and for Africans,” Geith said in an e-mail.

Geith and two other MSU researchers — epidemiology professor John Kaneene and Cliff Lampe, an assistant professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences — will work with the Nairobi, Kenyan-based initiative Open Education Resources Africa to digitize books, research papers, case studies and data and allow free access without copyright restrictions.

The project’s primary goal is to make it easier for researchers and others involved in agricultural business to share resources and information. Researchers will use the first nine months of the project for planning and the second nine months to test the system of open resources, Geith said.

MSU’s network of organizations, such as social media research and agriculture groups, and its extensive involvement in Africa provides a unique asset to the project, Geith said.

After he assesses the technology that is used in Africa, Lampe will devise a plan for implementing new additions and help the participants use
the programs.

“My goal is to understand how our African partners use technology currently and develop a plan to deploy our services within that framework,” Lampe said.

The project could be beneficial, said Eric Crawford, an MSU professor in the
Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, co-director of the department’s Food Security Group and member of the African Studies
Core Faculty.

However, he said several issues, such as Africa’s low level of Internet access, could limit its success. Crawford is not involved in the project.

“Access to these resources can be lower cost, but it does mean that people have to have that kind of access available to them through their institution,” Crawford said.

Filling in the gaps of knowledge throughout the agricultural field is one of the things that Geith hopes to address.

“We don’t mean just fill the known gaps, and then it’s done,” Geith said in an e-mail.

“We mean continually identifying areas of curriculum improvement and having a dynamic community of people that makes this a continuous cycle, like the iTunes or the iPod apps of agriculture and learning.”

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