Abstract:
According to the popular press, the Internet has fostered a revolution in educational technology. This paper examines the extent of the revolution in agricultural economics instruction. A web crawler is used to locate and categorize online course materials. Forty-five percent of the agricultural economics courses sampled had a website but only 23 percent of the courses sampled used a website to convey course content. Most of the materials found are traditional course documents transmitted over the Internet. These materials substitute directly for "traditional" teaching materials. Economic production analysis indicates that if a new input directly substitutes for an existing input, and if the new and existing inputs cost roughly the same and are a small portion of the total cost of the output, then output will be largely unaffected by the choice of the new versus the old input. By this argument, current online agricultural economics course materials will not greatly increase learning. Internet applications that offer promise are those that do not directly substitute for existing materials or those that significantly reduce the student's cost of learning a concept. These applications were not found. Hence, the educational revolution has had limited impact in agricultural economics.
Keywords:
internet usage, agricultural economics
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