Abstract:
Couses taught in agronomy, like most other fields in agricultural higher education have tended to become more specialized and compartmentalized. Few courses are designed to offer a broad subject matter format, especially one with a global perspective. Declining enrollment is another concern in many agronomy departments. An active recruiting program is one answer to this problem, another is to attract additional students from other majors within the university into agronomy courses. One method to address these two concerns is to develop within the curriculum an offering that can benefit students already in the program, and also has an appeal for students who are not majors. With the increasing emphasis on the global nature of markets and economy, a survey course with a global prespective can accomplish both goals; that of introducing an international component into the curriculum for agronomy majors, and providing a popular service course for others in the college comunity with a global interest. World Crops and Cropping systems has been taught for 5 years at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In that period of time an average of 133 students per year have taken this course. This course is only required in the agronomy department, and agronomy majors have only made up 10-15% of the enrollment. Therefore, 85-90% of the students are taking World Crops and Cropping Systems as an elective. During this same period, overall student evaluations for this course have averaged 3.8 on a scale with 4.0 as the highest evaluation.
Keywords:
agronomy, undergraduate non-majors, globalization
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