I hope you will take a couple minutes to watch this short end of the year video message.
The examples shared here are clearly just a few of our division’s accomplishments. I invite you to also reflect back on 2013.
What accomplishment are you the most proud of from the past year? Please share below and one person will be chosen at random as the winner of an OSU gift basket. Your comments may also be referenced at our State of the Division address on Tuesday, January 21 at 10am.
Thank you for your many contributions! I look forward to working with you in the year ahead.
Scott
I’m proud to have worked with author Edward Jensen, EESC graphic designer Erik Simmons, and other EESC and OSU colleagues to publish Shrubs to Know in Pacific Northwest Forests. This field guide is a wonderful companion to the popular Trees to Know in Oregon, and it’s quickly becoming a best seller in its own right. EESC has sold more than 550 copies of Shrubs to Know in its first three months of publication. Learn more in this news release about Shrubs to Know.
I am proud to have been associated with Extension for many years, first through the 4H program in Lake County and the past 10 years as a member of the Extension Citizens Advisory Network. I was also honored to represent OSU Extension on 2 occasions at the Public Issues Leadership Development conference in Wash DC. I am continually amazed at the depth and breadth of Extension, and the dedication of the many staff and volunteers that make it such a great organization.
In just three short months in the spring of 2013 the Oregon 4-H Marine Science Camp team designed and delivered the first ever 4-H Marine Ambassadors camp. The fifty-seven campers were selected from over 180 applications. All selected youth received a full scholarship excepting a $35 fee. The youth came from 24 of Oregon’s 36 counties. Thirty percent of youth were eligible for free or reduced cost lunch programs.
A highlight of the campus program was the hands-on tsunami lesson at the Hinsdale Wave Research Center. On the coast, youth participated in lessons at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and visited education sites to study tide pools, beach ecology, fresh water ecosystems, estuaries, tides and recent tsunami debris. Aboard Ocean Watch youth learned from Captains Mark Schrader and Andy Gregory about their Around the America’s educational efforts. Seventeen 4-H faculty and staff, and five volunteers served as van drivers, counselors and educators.
Campers were asked about the impact of the camp on their science plans and aspirations. The percentages of youth who “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with each statement were:
• I have an increased interest in science (98%)
• I know more about ocean health (92.2%)
• I plan to take action to take care of the ocean (92.2%)
• I want to take more science classes at school (84.3%)
• I am thinking of a career in marine science (74.5%)
Wasco County 4-H is proud of their work in training youth to think scientifically. The Nation has concerns regarding our young peoples’ preparedness for the 21st century job force and that sentiment is echoed within our community’s high tech businesses. Several years ago, Wasco County 4-H heard the concerns and developed a comprehensive science-focused program covering a variety of subjects offered through many different venues. The program includes delivery through in-school, after- school, camp, and traditional club venues and covers 4-H project areas of computer and technology, animal science, natural science, foods and nutrition, clothing and textiles, and expressive arts. Evaluations have indicated positive gains in components of scientific thinking, procedures and communication, as well as more interest in pursuing further study in the sciences.
In 2013, Ecampus launched the Quality Matters (QM) Initiative. QM is an independent continuous improvement model that helps assure the quality of online courses through a collegial, but rigorous, course review process. QM focuses on the design of online and hybrid classes, as opposed to the delivery or content of the courses. The QM rubric and trainings are
• Based upon national standards of best practice, research, and instructional design principles;
• Designed to promote student learning;
• Integral to continuous quality improvement; and
• Part of a faculty-driven, collegial peer review process.
I am very proud to share that the Ecampus Course Development and Training unit, with much coordination by Karen Watte, worked with faculty from across campus to have our first five Ecampus courses QM certified in 2013. We hope this will be the first five of many more QM certifications to come!
(If you’d like to learn more about this initiative, visit http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/faculty/qm/.)
I choose to not only look back on 2013 but all the way back to 1954 and forward to 2014. I am proud to have edited, with Dr. Cynthia M. Ocamb, OSU’s 60th edition of the PNW Plant Disease Management Handbook with the help of Jennifer Alexander and others at EESC. Due out in March 2014, this publication is used not only by Oregon growers but also throughout the PNW and beyond. Through the work of over 200 people over the decades, this document has been available in print since 1954 and continuously online since 1996. We look forward to building on this great resource in the years to come.
It’s been exciting to work with Ask an Expert, as it evolved into a mature system that involves hundreds of dedicated Extension personnel reaching out to Oregonians…and beyond..with science-based answers to pressing questions. In just three years, our experts have made Oregon one of the top five implementers in the nation of this next generation system. Ask an Expert has become a means for what I refer to as “micro-engagement” with sometimes surprisingly interaction generated from a single question. And the questions themselves are fascinating…sometimes funny, sometimes touching, always interesting. It offers a birds-eye view of a slice of life on an hourly basis, 24-7.
During summer 2013, the OSU Hybrid Course Initiative expanded beyond the Corvallis campus to work with the first group of six OSU-Cascades faculty. The faculty participated in a professional learning community throughout the summer that included face-to-face meetings as well as online resources and interaction. The upshot of this program was that the participants redesigned existing on-campus courses as hybrid courses that have significant online learning activities to replace some of the traditional “seat time.” Four of these courses are being offered for the first time this term, with others soon to follow.
These new hybrid courses employ nationally recognized best practices in blended learning to enhance student success and engagement. With reduced face-to-face meeting time, these hybrid courses also provide greater scheduling flexibility for OSU-Cascades students, many of whom have significant family and work responsibilities outside of school. I’m grateful for the teamwork between the OSU-Cascades administration, Ecampus and the Center for Teaching and Learning that has made this program possible. We plan to continue the program with another group of faculty in summer 2014.
The Food Hero team is very proud of the large increase in the # of visits to our website which is one component of our multi channel social marketing campaign that targets limited income parents throughout Oregon. In 2012 we saw an average of ~5,600 monthly visits to FoodHero.org. In 2013 that jumped to an average of ~27,300 visits/month. Remarkably in the final quarter of 2013 the average visits per month jumped again to 38,000, with the years high in November at 41,662 visits. The majority of the visits were from Oregon, including 34 of Oregon’s counties, but visits also represented all 50 United states, plus 190 additional countries.
Visit our most popular recipe and most “hit” page on the website for 2013 here: https://www.foodhero.org/recipes/chicken-broccoli-cheese-skillet-meal.
The beginning of 2013 marked the end of a two year process to engage the public in helping OSU find a location for their future grid connected wave energy test center. While finding a location could have been a purely engineering driven process, I was proud of OSU and the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center ( a joint center between OSU and UW) in turning to the Oregon Sea Grant Extension Program to help them not only inform the public about the project but to truly have the public drive the process, including actually select the site. This approach is backwards to many of the other ocean use processes that Oregon and other states has seen. The next challenge was actually figuring out how to do it. Designing, executing, and facilitating that process was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I have had both professionally and personally. And in January 2013, Newport Oregon was selected as the future home of this test facility. The facility will increase our understanding of marine renewable energy, and the potential effects to the marine environment. It will also bring economic development to the Oregon Coast. But it also had an additional benefit, that of actually bringing the community together around a topic that had potential of being explosive. IN working with a few of the coastal communities in this process, there were opportunities to actually connect and repair relationships between local government and stakeholders, something that both benefited our process, but that we recognized benefited a whole lot more than just OSU. A particular mayor smiled at me and said, wow you actually left this community better than you found it. That was a proud day both for me and for OSU Extension.
During federal fiscal year 2013 (October 2012 to September 2013), the Lane Extension Food Pantry Project coordinated 35 trained volunteers to visit local food pantry sites. These volunteers shared basic nutrition information about how to eat healthy on a budget and ideas about how to use the foods they receive at the food pantry through Food Hero recipe tastings. During this time, volunteers reached 10,955 Lane County community members through approximately 1784 hours of service. In October 2013, a Volunteer Advisory Board was established with 6 experienced volunteers to help guide these efforts in the future.
I’m proud to be working with OSU Extension in Lane County to rebuild a 4-H program here. Last year, we went from 0 youth involved in 4-H programs to 133 youth involved in just our first few months. From there, we are continuing to grow in youth involvement and also in providing quality positive youth development programs in Lane County. I’m new to Extension, but already proud to work with such a passionate, creative, intelligent, committed group of people in my county and across the state. We are building a 4-H program, a positive youth development culture, and a more united Extension office in Lane County and I’m very glad, and proud, to be a part of it.
I’m proud to have worked with a superb team on the LinC Extend project, which aims to bring OSU undergraduate students into contact and collaboration with OSU Extension programs, with mutual benefit for all parties. The project (LinC = Learning in Communities) was originally funded through a grant from USDA that was completed in 2012. In summer 2013 LinC Extend was recognized by the Western Extension Directors’ Association with the association’s Award of Excellence, one of only two state program winners from the 13 states and 4 territories of the WEDA region. Also in 2013, an Extension team has been working to develop a new course for undergraduates in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences that is based on what was learned from the grant project. The aims of the proposed course are to help students understand community-based programming and gain skills and awareness needed for success when working in community settings. The College of Agricultural Sciences is currently working on developing a course with a similar theme, so the concept of creating some formal mechanisms to bring undergraduates together with Extension seems to be an idea whose time has come!
I think I’m most proud of the Professional and Non-credit Education course on plant problem diagnosis that I launched and taught with Jay Pscheidt in fall 2013. This is a unique curriculum which specifically focuses on the process of diagnosing the cause of a problem on a plant, which may be disease, or may be insect, or may be a vertebrate pest or may be caused by one of a myriad of cultural or environmental factors. The curriculum is delivered online, and in the non-credit form consists of 10 weeks of lectures, problem examples, quizzes and a final project. The class is marketed to both professional and non-professional clients. The class in fall 2013 enrolled 22 students. The students included a retail nursery employee (Jackson Co), a landscape designer (Multnomah County), a City of Eugene Landscape Program Coordinator (Lane Co) and Landscape maintenance clientele from Douglas county and Washington State. In addition, 6 Master Gardeners from various Oregon counties enrolled. Following the course, feedback from the class members was very positive!
I am most proud of my development of the Beginning Urban Farmer Apprenticeship (BUFA) in collaboration with Multnomah County. This program is the only formal relationship that OSU Extension has with Multnomah County. (BUFA) is a season-long and in-depth training to provide 550+ hours of field training, lectures, field trips, direct marketing experience, and on-line learning platform focused on intensive vegetable production in community and urban settings. The field experience for BUFA occurs at both an OSU site (OSU/PSU Learning Gardens Laboratory) and at Multnomah County’s Community Reaps our Produce and Shares (CROPS) site in Troutdale. BUFA curriculum includes OSU’s pre-established curriculum Growing Farms: Successful Whole Farm Management seminar series focused on farm business management. The BUFA program has been validated by community partners that have provided in-kind donations (0.75 FTE to date from primary partner Multnomah County), funding through competitive grants including $40,000 from East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District, $90,000 sub-award through MercyCorp Northwest from USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Program grant, and $60,000 in unsolicited sponsorship from West Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District. BUFA has also generated $77,987 in program fees in three runs of the course. Many BUFA graduates (27 of 66) are continuing to advance their careers in agriculture including starting small-scale operations and working on farms.
In 2013, I joined Oregon State’s Professional and Continuing Education. Among the many projects we’ve worked on in the past 10 months, a personal favorite was the Craft Brewery Startup Workshop. This 5-day, onsite experience brought 42 people from around the world (really, Taiwan and Australia were represented!) to the OSU Cascades campus to meet other like-minded enthusiasts and learn what it takes to open a craft brewery. Their dream combined with Oregon State knowledge and expertise will impact many people in different economies, cultures, and locations. I’m proud to be a part of the group that made it happen!
I am proud to have worked with faculty around campus to create the FIESTAS project.
Families Involved in Education: Sociocultural Teaching and STEM (FIESTAS) is a collaboration between OSU’s College of Education, 4-H Youth Development, and the Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences (SMILE) program.
The primary focus of the 4-H STEM program is to enhance the knowledge of STEM related topics of Latino and underrepresented youth in the 3rd to 5th grades while incorporating OSU College Students as mentors and STEM facilitators.
We incorporated Preservice teachers into this 4-H program because we think that is a great way to engage with culturally and linguistically diverse youth. This is specially important due to the changing demographics of the K-12 population, which do no align with the demographic of the teachers demographics.
This project has 2 direct purposes:
1.) Expose and recruit Latino Youth in 4-H and STEM-related programs.
2.) Engage preservice teachers in culturally and linguistically diverse settings.
The following story illustrates how meaningful this experience has been for both Preservice teachers and 4-H youth:
A group of two Preservice teachers and three youth went to a community garden and made a science video about different kind of spicy chilies. The youth utilized their cultural knowledge and home practices to create classifications and scientific explanations about chilies. The Preservice teachers were surprised about the extent of the youth’s depth of knowledge and guided their use of scientific processes to leverage this knowledge for academic contexts. One Preservice teachers said the following: “Create connections with how science is a study of the world with a student’s natural love for the outdoors and you may end up creating a whole new generation of scientists.”
The impact of this project extends beyond the afterschool program to the future teaching practices of Preservice teachers and the youth they will serve; both audiences benefit from their respective diversity and in the long term Preservice teachers gain experience and confidence in working with youth from culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
This projects helps integrating outreach and engagement thorough the university and the extended community. I also makes 4-H educational programs accessible for youth and OSU College Students while making them more “Culturally relevant”
We hope to make this collaboration a sustainable model. To see more about how this partnership is developing, you can visit this link:
http://education.oregonstate.edu/fiestas-families-involved-education-sociocultural-teaching-and-stem
I’m proud to have worked with Nino Adams (translator) and Jim Sloan at EESC to develop a caneberry nutrient management program for the Russian grower community in Oregon. Over ten percent of the caneberry acreage in the Northern Willamette Valley is owned and managed by Russian growers. Most of these older generation growers are not proficient enough in English to understand our Extension publications and/or do not come to our educational programs because of language or cultural constraints. Extension faculty and field reps (fertilizer companies) have noted the relatively poor nutritional management of many caneberry fields managed by Russian growers. Poor nutritional management leads to a reduction in yield or quality and possibly poses environmental risk. The goals of this project were to provide written and oral information and share this with the Russian grower community via an educational workshop. The project was funded by a Clackamas Extension Innovative Grant. Our outcomes included a Russian translated extension publication (“Caneberry Nutrient Management Guide, EM8903-R), supplemental educational materials translated into Russian, and a 3 hour workshop (Dec. 20, 2013) where presentations and handouts of slides were available in Russian. Feedback from the educational program was very positive and we reached an audience that we normally would not with our programming.
I am proud of my work with Extension faculty Dan McGrath and Luisa Santamaria to publish bilingual products in the Extension catalog that are specifically designed to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking workers. The publication “Deciding When to Treat for 12-Spot Beetles in Snap Beans / Cómo y Cuándo Controlar al Escarabajo de 12 Manchas en los Ejotes (vainitas, habichuelas)” (EM8906) used a side-by-side translation format to make it easier for farmers who want to improve their technical knowledge of Spanish and employees who want to improve their English. This publication sparked interest in creating more resources for workers, a traditionally underserved and rapidly growing audience. Because such an effort requires collaboration across the University and the wider community, I met with Extension faculty, and partners at the Integrated Plant Protection Center, the Center for Latin@ Studies and Engagement, and Linn-Benton Community College to move this work forward. I am excited looking ahead to 2014 with more bilingual projects in the works, including pocket-size Christmas tree pest identification guides that will have smartphone compatible websites so that the information is available in English and Spanish on the go.
One of the greatest challenges that bees are faced with in agricultural environments is exposure to pesticides. While recognizing the fact that application of pesticides for crop protection and protection of bees are not mutually exclusive, we are proud of our revised extension publication PNW 591 titled “How to Reduce Bee Poisoning from Pesticides” (http://bit.ly/OSU_ReduceBeePoisoning). To date this is the only up-to-date and most extensive publication available on this topic. Using this publication growers can easily look up the pesticide in question and make an informed decision on the use of the chemical in his/her crop with the goal of protecting bee health. We are very happy to hear that growers are using this publication extensively and are genuinely concerned about bee health. We have also received excellent feedback from beekeepers regarding this publication. This publication provides both parties (growers and beekeepers) a necessary tool to make informed decisions.
As we begin our third year with the Oregon Master Beekeeper Program (http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mb/), we are also proud to look back on our accomplishments and to look ahead to future outcomes. Sixty Oregon Master Beekeeper Program volunteers from all over the state have trained nearly 300 beginning beekeepers in the past two years. The incoming class of 2014 has record 186 students enrolled at the beginning level. Last year, we launched the advanced level, which offers students advanced training and opportunities to share their knowledge through earning service points. This year, we look forward to developing the Master Level, in which we hope to incorporate a Citizen Scientists component. We have secured a total of $ 135,000 funding from ODA Specialty Crop Block Grants in the past two years to develop this unique program.
As the news leader for the Extension and Experiment Station Communications department, I am proud to have been part of a team that developed the Bridges to Prosperity website. We created the site to show policymakers how OSU’s three statewide public service programs are improving Oregonians’ lives and the state’s economy. The website was viewed about 11,500 times in 2013. It contains 65 impact statements about the contributions of the Extension Service, the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Forest Research Laboratory.
To ensure that those stories, as well as our news releases and our OAP magazine features, end up in the hands of lawmakers, we sent selected ones to DC-based kglobal for posting on their Ag is America website and Facebook and Twitter pages. Kglobal is a public relations firm hired by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to demonstrate to Congress and the public the impact of agricultural research on the U.S. economy.
Last year, Ag is America mentioned OSU Extension 52 times on its Twitter page, which is followed by nearly 26,000 people. Also in 2013, the Ag is America website picked up 16 of our stories, many of which focused on health and nutrition – both subjects that kglobal was strategically emphasizing.
We have continued to feed Ag is America our content in 2014. We plan to share our stories and extensive multimedia content from the winter 2014 issue of Oregon’s Agricultural Progress with them for posting on their website and YouTube channel.
I’m proud of my efforts to communicate the work of the Extension Service via our social media channels on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Working with my team and department, I developed a comprehensive social media strategy in 2013 to educate and engage new audiences. I also analyzed strategic benchmarks. Because it can disseminate information so rapidly and amplify content so well, social media is a powerful communications tool for Extension.
Here are some highlights of the year:
• I trained 141 faculty in campus and county offices on social media best practices in presentations and one-on-one sessions.
• Our Facebook page is followed by 2,020 fans, an 84 percent increase since November, 2012.
• Visits to the OSU Extension website from links on our Facebook page by people using computers: 4,769
• Visits to the OSU Extension website from links on our Facebook page by people using mobile devices: 2,361
• Number of times OSU Extension content was displayed in users’ news feeds or tickers: 526,038
• Number of people who follow OSU Extension on Twitter: 1,786, a 76% increase since December, 2012
• Number of times journalists and media outlets mentioned, retweeted, or “favorite”-ed our tweets: 45
• Pinners who follow OSU Extension: 930 since launch in December, 2012
• Repins of our pins: 4,264
• Visits to the OSU Extension website from Pinterest: 3,099
Follow us on social media:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
For the latest issue of Oregon’s Agricultural Progress, EESC was guided by the question, “How does our audience access information today?” From that starting point, we renewed the department’s emphasis on multimedia, re-designed the magazine’s presentation on the web and created the first-ever OAP mobile app. In addition, our print version was also influenced by the changing behavior of readers and reflects their evolving expectations. As content creators, EESC should be very proud of the results, and we hope you are, too.
Web: http://oregonprogress.oregonstate.edu/
App: http://oregonprogress.oregonstate.edu/winter-2014/apps
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/oregonstateextension