Mobile Online Learning Course on Floriculture

Abstract

The field of agriculture is vitally important for most developing countries, and education on agriculture must change to meet today s needs. It must produce sufficient sustenance to fulfill the requirement of increasing population. A key element to achieve these is to encourage the adoption of more sustainable farming practices, but this would require that farmers become more knowledgeable about the practices they employ and in how they market their production. Nowadays, rapid development of information and communication technologies leads to introducing new forms of communication and learning, including electronic learning and mobile learning. E-Learning and m-learning is a potentially viable and cost-effective way to facilitate knowledge development among agricultural professionals and farmers but is still not widely employed in Sri Lanka. This project focuses on encouraging the students and teacher s perception of the use of ELearning and Mobile Learning in learning at Faculty of Agriculture, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. It allows greater access to more students and farmers who are engaged in mobile technology, more efficiently, with better information. In order to achieve that, the course Floriculture which is conducted by the department of Plant Sciences is selected as a sample course. E-learning and m-learning materials are designed and developed for this course and allow users to access the course through the Learning Management System. This project basically illustrates the major developments and the uses of e-learning and m-learning in the field of agriculture and investigates the opportunities in online learning in agriculture.