Polepalli Krishna Reddy1, Basi Bhaskar Reddy1, and D. Rama Rao2
1 IT for Agriculture and Rural Development Research Center,
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH), Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India
2 National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM),
Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, India [email protected]
Abstract. A model of crop specific virtual labs is proposed to improve
practical agricultural education by considering the agricultural educa- tion system in India. In agricultural education, the theoretical concepts are being imparted through class room lectures and laboratory skills are imparted in the dedicated laboratories. Further, practical agricultural education is being imparted by exposing the students to the field prob- lems through Rural Agricultural Work Experience Program (RAWEP), experiential learning and internships. In spite of these efforts, there is a feeling that the level of practical skills exposed to the students is not up to the desired level. So we have to devise the new ways and means to enhance the practical knowledge and skills of agricultural students to understand the real-time crop problems and provide the corrective steps at the field level. Recent developments in ICTs, thus, provide an oppor- tunity to improve practical education by developing virtual crop labs. The virtual crop labs contain a well organized, indexed and summarized digital data (text, photograph, and video). The digital data corresponds to farm situations reflecting life cycles of several farms of different crops cultivated under diverse farming conditions. The practical knowledge of the students could be improved, if we systematically expose them to virtual crop labs along with course teaching. We can employ cloud com- puting platform to store huge amounts of data and render to students and other stakeholders in an online manner.
Keywords: IT for agriculture education, agro-informatics, virtual crop
labs, decision support system.
1
Introduction
The crop problems are highly location/resource specific and vary considerably with agro-climatic zones. The crop production and protection related problems
S. Srinivasa and V. Bhatnagar (Eds.): BDA 2012, LNCS 7678, pp. 62–76, 2012. c
vary based on variations in soil, seed, weather, cropping history, crop environ- ment and agro-climatic zone. Also, the problems vary year to year due to seasonal variations.
It is expected that the graduates produced from agricultural universities should possess theoretical, lab and practical (field) knowledge regarding crop husbandry. The theoretical knowledge includes fundamental concepts regarding crop husbandry. Laboratory knowledge cover the ability to diagnose the prob- lem in the dedicated lab once the samples are provided. The practical knowledge includes the ability to (i) understand the seed to seed spatio-temporal problem dynamics of farms in diverse agro-climatic situations for different crops (crop varieties) and (ii) give advisories/suitable corrective measures for crop various husbandry problems.
We have made an effort to propose a model of virtual crop labs to impart practical agricultural education by considering the agricultural education system in India. However, the model is general enough to be extended to other countries having agricultural farming and education systems similar to India.
In agricultural education, the theoretical concepts are being imparted through class room lectures and the laboratory skills in the dedicated laboratories. Re- garding imparting of practical knowledge, efforts are being made to give practical education by exposing the students to the field problems in college farms and the program called Rural Agricultural Work Experience Programme (RAWEP). In spite of these efforts, still there is a feeling that the level of practical skills exposed to the students is not up to the desired level. So, we have to devise the methods to enhance the practical knowledge and skills of agricultural students to understand the real time crop problems and provide the corrective steps at the field level. In this paper, we propose a framework of virtual crop labs for enhanced practical education by exploiting the developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as database, digital photography, video and internet technology.
In the next section, we explain the related work. In section 3, we discuss the importance of practical education and gaps in the existing practical learning framework. In section 4, we present the proposed model of virtual crop labs. In section 5, we discuss the role of virtual crop labs in practical learning. In section 6, we explain how the proposed framework results into huge data maintenance and rendering task and requires cloud computing environment. The last section contains conclusions and future work.
2
Related Work
DIAGNOSIS in plant pathology - teaching tool that has been used at Massey University and other institutions in New Zealand since 1989. DIAGNOSIS presents students with a problem to solve, captures their diagnosis, justifica- tion and solution skills, and provides feedback. Students generally react very positively to the exercises. They are forced to integrate and synthesize mate- rial learned elsewhere in other classes (soil science, plant physiology, entomology
etc.) thereby look and understand the problem in a holistic manner [3]. The real value of DIAGNOSIS is in the quality of the scenarios and how the exercises are used within a course. This quality and appropriateness of use comes from ded- icated plant pathology teachers and practitioners themselves. The experience, wisdom and knowledge of extension plant pathologists can be embodied in a scenario, and used by a skilful teacher and pose challenge to students [6][7][8] for identification.
It has been noted in many locations around the globe that applied crop pro- duction and protection specialists are not being trained in the numbers needed to support current and future extension efforts in agriculture. Therefore, plant pathology graduate students need to be exposed to applied aspects of plant pathology and especially diagnostic reasoning [9]. Techniques of isolation and pathogen identification are easy to teach in a standard university course, but teaching the skills of the field diagnosis are a lot more difficult, especially in departments without active extension programme and with stretched teach- ing resources [5]. The same is the case with other applied disciplines of crop husbandry.
A distance diagnostic and identification system (DDIS) was developed at the University of Florida which allows the users to submit digital samples obtained in the field for rapid diagnosis and identification of plants, diseases, insects and animals [10]. Along with DDIS a user friendly rich internet digital media library application called DDISMedia is also being developed to help users to collect, manage, and retrieve high-quality media from the DDIS database and to assist specialists in pest diagnosis. The DDISMedia is a peer-reviewed media database, which contains a collection of digital media of plant pests, diseases and plant samples produced by specialists of different disciplines. The media library could also be used for research, educational programmes, teaching and learning [11].
Fourth’s Deans committee constituted by Indian Council of Agricultural Re- search (ICAR) in 2007 [1] recommended the curriculum which is being followed in Indian agriculture universities. The curriculum stresses the importance of im- parting practical education in agriculture. In the research report [2] submitted by National Research Council, USA, the importance of developing innovative methods for imparting practical education in agriculture is stressed.
A system called eSagu [4] has been built in which the agricultural experts have to identify the production/protection/other problems by looking at the digital photographs. It was observed that if expert is provided with dynamics of case and effective relationships of the problems with time, diagnosis as well as advisory delivery becomes easy. Based on this observation, an effort [12] has been made to develop a data warehouse of crop care concepts to impart practical learning. Effort has been made to develop framework of virtual crop labs in [13]. In [14], a content development framework has been proposed which contains the content related to location-specific weather sensitive crop operations to improve the quality of agromet bulletins.