Rebuilding Trust through Journalism Education

This study details the development of a public affairs reporting course for journalism schools in resource-limited communities offered at a land-grant institution surrounded by a resource-strapped community. This chapter focuses on inequalities related to opportunities for engagement, both when it comes to newsrooms and academic settings. More specifically, we address the challenges of teaching a multimedia-based curriculum while maintaining historical relationships with local citizens in Michigan. Our approach of combining survey, content analysis, in-depth interviews, and a field experiment provides a framework for connecting journalism education with communities surrounding land-grant institutions.

341 How the IACUC uses the Ag Guide to ensure the best care

All Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) are all subject to the same regulatory requirements. Membership requirements (Scientist, Nonscientist, Attending Veterinarian, Public Members, and Chairperson) are established by the regulatory agencies and appointed by the Institutional Official (IO). Today we will review the basic role of the IACUC: reviewing animal use protocols, inspecting animal facilities and procedure areas, evaluating the program of animal care, investigating allegations of non-compliance, making recommendations to the institutional official about needed changes, and utilizing the Ag Guide as a guidance document. The role of the IACUC at Land Grant Institutions is confounded often by the variety of research that is conducted. At the University of Nebraska, we have traditional food and fiber, biomedical and wildlife research, which requires a diverse set of committee members to adequately review the animal care and use. All IACUC protocols, regardless of the species or funding mechanism, are required to address several common questions. As a principal investigator, you can help yourself tremendously by providing all the required information in a transparent, logical and organized manner. If you can anticipate your audience and provide key information in multiple formats, it will help streamline the review process. Based on membership requirements, most committee members will not come from agriculture backgrounds, so it is imperative you help the committee to understand standard agriculture practices. You can best accomplish this with standard operating procedures, herd management protocols, disaster plans, and veterinary care processes and provide photographs or short video clips of your proposed activities. Additionally, if you are asked to serve on this committee, be willing to proactively educate your peers on what is considered appropriate management, housing, experimental and humane endpoints. By acting as your own advocate, you can ensure good animal care as well as achieve timely approvals.

193 Equine teaching programs – where do they fit?

Equine teaching programs in Animal Science Departments throughout the Midwest region land grant institutions have greatly expanded over the past 20 years. However, private schools with equine programs focused on large equitation programs have shown a reduction in recent years. Most indicated cost and reduced student numbers as factors to the decline. In evaluation of 12 land-grant institutions in the Midwest Animal Science region, 100% offer one or more equine Animal Science courses with a range of 1 to 16 different equine focused courses. Nearly all schools offer a combination of lecture and “hands-on” courses. Lecture courses focused on management, nutrition, evaluation, etc. were offed at all 12 institutions with most offering between 2 to 4 equine lecture type courses. Enrollments in these courses range between 10 – 50 students or more. However, highly popular hands on courses covering training, equitation, and handling have lower enrollment limits (10-15), lab fees, and schools offer between one to 6 different courses. Makeup of students enrolling in all courses is highly diverse from students with extensive prior horse skills and experience, to those with minimal experience. Furthermore, all of the institutions evaluated used the equine courses within their Animal Science major and three offered an Equine Option within Animal Science. However, this may be reflective of the structure of each Animal Science Department. Equine courses tend to be highly popular and attract students from various majors across intuitions. Offering courses to serve and attract this diverse student population is a challenge to departments, especially with the increased cost of maintaining herds for highly popular hands on courses. However, departments must strive to find a balance between lecture/distance and hands-on courses to provide students the educational experience exposing them to the equine industry and future careers.

Land-grants, libraries, and learned societies as exemplary partners: A proposal for a scoring system to evaluate publishers as partners with higher education

Background: For decades, academic editors, authors, librarians, and institutions have expressed discontent with scholarly journal publishing. Problems include editorial boards frustrated by terms they do not control, high costs of subscriptions and/or big deal “bundled” journal packages, consolidation of publishers, and so on, yet there are few methods to compare or evaluate publishers. Goal: How might institutions of higher education compare publishers? In particular, how might libraries and land-grant institutions identify publishers that share their values in order to make informed decisions about resource allocation? Methods: Equity of access, information exchange, and the sustainability of scholarship—three common values shared by land-grant universities, the profession of librarianship, and/or many learned societies—were used to develop a scoring system for publishers. The scoring system, called Publishers Acting as Partners with Public Institutions of Higher Education and Land-grant Universities, or PAPPI, evaluates publishers’ practices in ten categories. A high score indicates strong alignment with library and land-grant values, and the values of many societies. A high-scoring publisher may be considered a partner with land-grant institutions. Results: Four journal titles were scored as proxies for scoring a publisher’s entire journal catalog. Highest scores were earned by a society’s journal and a library-published transdisciplinary journal. Conclusions: Publishers wanting to align with mission-driven institutions of higher education may use the scoring system’s criteria to guide practices or priorities. Institutions and libraries may use the scoring system to consider a more comprehensive view of what it means to support and/or be published by publishers that act as partners with institutions of higher education.

62 Program Evaluation of the Georgia Young Cattlemen’s Short Course

A day-long short course was developed to fill a need for extension programming targeted at producers between the ages of 18 and 40. Faculty from land grant institutions and allied industry personnel were invited to Rocking W Angus Farm in Jefferson, GA, to present and give demonstrations on five topics relevant to young cattlemen. A program evaluation was conducted to 1) Assess demographic characteristics of participants; 2) Evaluate the participant’s experience; 3) Understand the motivation of the participants to get involved in industry activities. The complete evaluation was distributed to course participants at the end of the day. Participants were 47.1% male (n = 16) and 52.9% female (n = 18) with an average age of 22.85 years (range 18–41). Participants were from 19 Georgia counties and 2 South Carolina counties. Twenty-five (74%) were full-time college students while the remainder (26%) represented 11 different professions. Twenty-five participants (75.8%) were current members of Georgia Cattlemen’s Association while 8 (24.2%) were non-members. Fourteen attendees (41%) did not own cattle, but had an interest in owning cattle in the future, and thirteen (38.2) owned cattle at the time of the course. The six (18%) remaining participants identified as interested consumers. A Likerttype scale (1 = “Strongly Disagree” to 5 = “Strongly Agree”) was used to evaluate the experience of short course attendees. The maximum mean from the Likerttype questions was 4.83 and the minimum mean was 3.96. The results suggest a need for more open and frequent communication with the target audience outside of the college student demographic. Also, expansion of communication to young cattlemen outside of North Georgia. The suggestion was made to develop a Young Cattlemen’s email listserv and to rotate the location of the short course each year.

SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE CURRICULUM AND CO-CURRICULUM: PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS AND THEIR COLLEGIATE PEERS

Although use of social media by students has been shown to be nearly ubiquitous, manyK-12 school systems have banned its use on their campuses or use between their teachers andstudents. In contrast, many collegiate faculty have utilized social media in their teaching. Socialmedia has been shown to assist faculty in engaging with students, helping students engage withcontent outside of class and sound implementation into the curriculum has been show to havepositive educational impacts. Data from a sample of two thousand and fifty-six college studentsacross two land-grant institutions is compared between pre-service teachers and their collegiatepeers. Pre-service teachers reported using Twitter in the curriculum more, were more inspired bythe use of social media use by their faculty, used social media more on their own for educationalpurposes and had a stronger belief that social media can be used for educationally relevantpurposes than their collegiate peers.