Since its inception in October 1999, the Plant and Soil Sciences e-Library project - a collection of "learning objects" - has grown to include 120 lessons (11 in Spanish) and 116 animations (21 in Spanish). These numbers have continued to rise and include topic areas in soil science, weed science, plant physiology, plant genetics, horticulture science, and turf science. A growing team of 28 content authors from 9 US and International academic institutions and other partners are contributing peer-reviewed content to the e-Library. It has experienced nearly 12 million hits from 427,269 unique visits from US and foreign sites in the past 12 months.
A key challenge for digital libraries that are growing but also aging is to update, prune, and develop new educational materials, courses, and workshops that keep instructors, outreach experts, and students at the cutting edge by facilitating rapid adoption by end-users. Materials developers have continued to create new materials that have the potential to begin addressing this challenge, particularly in meeting the needs of advanced professionals and adult learners interested in continuing education, as well as students interested in pursuing formal academic degrees. This project is re-developing (or re-invigorating) a digital learning community where learning objects can be redesigned, reorganized and aggregated to facilitate active inquiry learning experiences that reflect state of the art knowledge. The project's objectives are: 1) Develop an online community for the purpose of developing a more effective learning environment (to take advantage of Web 2.0) where developers and selected teachers can share their ideas, successes, and experiences in using the e-Library and engage in collaboratively repackage the objects; 2) Create a digital learning community framework in which the repackaging of learning objects may be driven by the non-guided learner, such as industry leaders, policy makers, or applied science practitioners needing professional development to meet the skills required in the workforce; and 3) Assess the new impact of these learning communities and continue the evaluation of how students and other learners with varying learning styles utilize the educational resources.
