Yakima Valley Community College's program expansion addresses the growing employment demand in Washington State's Viticulture (grape growing) and Enology (winemaking) industry by redesigning its 2-year AAS programs in Vineyard and Winery Technology. The curriculum is developed around the wine industry calendar year to take advantage of externships at local vineyards and wineries, while allowing for continual pursuit of an associates level degree. The change in curriculum offering is designed to correlate with the industry down times, as well as the existing academic calendar, and give flexibility for work experiences during the busiest times for the industry: harvest and crush, which currently conflict with fall quarter classes. In addition, the college is developing the curriculum for online delivery while maintaining the hands-on technical and science based training using short course and weekend seminars and practicums at the YVCC Teaching Winery and Vineyard.
The primary goal of the National Science Foundation Grant #1003721 was to redesign the face to face Vineyard and Winery Technology courses at Yakima Valley Community College (YVCC) into hybrid/online courses. These activities include curriculum revision and course calendar adjustment. From 2010-2014, the full-time and adjunct faculty of YVCC’s Agriculture Department learned the principles of instructional design and best practices in online teaching. While learning these principles and practices the faculty redesigned thirteen courses and created two new hybrid/online courses. Faculty formed a peer-mentoring group where all fifteen of the hybrid/online courses were reviewed in-house using the Quality Matters Rubric. During this process strong and positive relationships were formed between YVCC’s Agriculture faculty and lessons learning during the hybrid/online teaching process were shared. Through this grant YVCC developed additional partnerships within the Washington Wine Industry, as seen by an increase in the number and diversity of its steering committee, as well as the number of internship locations for students. Other benefits from this grant project to YVCC include an increase in the number of tech-prep agreements with local high schools, a strong marketing campaign for the program, a partnership with the National Science Foundation National Center of Excellence VESTA (Viticulture, Enology, Science, Technology Alliance) and an articulation agreement with Washington State University.
