Agricultural education in NZ. 1. Better ways needed for future learning

 

By Dr Clive Dalton

Future demand for trained staff

The Minister of Primary Industry expects New Zealand agriculture to double export earnings by 2025, which will be in a climate of relentless costs rises, increasing international competition from subsidised farmers, and increasing food safety standards. There were no instructions from the politicians as to how this could be done.  

To achieve this goal, the Minister’s other prediction was we’d need 50,000 new recruits at all levels of the industry (see comment later regarding this figure).  To get anywhere near these targets – in my view, we’ll need a revolution in primary industry education.  At the moment, our teaching is in the dark ages.

Change will have to start with massive changes in ‘learning’, which in turn will need a bombshell under current ways of ‘teaching’, because today’s learners are tomorrow’s farmers and investors, and they are going to have to be smarter in all aspects of business and technology than ever was dreamed of before.

This is because predicting what new information primary industry will need by 2025 can only be guesswork.  Nobody right now would have any idea. What we can predict with any certainty is that we are facing a rapidly changing world, with the speed of change increasing daily.  It’s a case of change, innovate, or go under.   Survival depends on ‘education’ and ‘innovation’, and the present New Zealand primary education situation won’t meet the Minister’s 2025 targets without rapid change.

Too many trainers

For a start, the current NZ primary education scene is a dog’s breakfast of providers and trainers, all offering courses to complete the same NZQA units, and many competing in each others' back yards for EFTS (Effective Full Time Students) which is simply a competition to get bums on seats to keep the organisations in business.  If the 50,000 people target has to be met by 2025, under the current setup, this silly competition needs to be ditched and sorted out at government level.

Classic proof of this nonsense was a piece in the NZ Farmers Weekly, September 29, 2014 by Rebecca Harper about new developments at Taratahi with the title 'Passion to produce quality workers'.  Quote: 'Taratahi seems to be everywhere these days. The residential campus is based near Masterton with non-residential campuses in Northland, Rodney, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Taranaki, Hawke's Bay, Manawatu, Wairarapa and Southland.' How stupid is that?

 My attempt to list courses and providers

I stress that this is an 'attempt'! I must have spent  hours searching websites of the main organisations, trying to find out what they did. Some are so full of 'bells and whistles' that getting answers to simple questions is not a feature they have tested before launching them.  So don't rely on my list as being accurate - as I gave up in the end. 

There should be an accurate list like this somewhere though. It certainly illustrates my point about 'teaching in each others' back yards.  Can you imagine how hard it must be for careers' teachers to give a student advice?  I tell any who ask me to always phone their nearest PrimaryITO office and not try to decipher this lot for a student.

Agriculture New Zealand. 

PTE owned by PGGWrightson.  Accredited for NZQA to deliver approved training at levels 1-6. 

Courses: Dairy, beef, sheep, deer

Locations: Sites throughout NZ for range of organisations (e.g. Landcorp).

Cost:  Paid in full by participants

Aoraki Polytechnic, Timaru.

PTE. Accredited for NZQA to deliver approved training Units at levels 2 -6.

Also Lincoln University Diploma in Agriculture (not NZQA Units).

Main Courses: Dairy, beef, sheep, deer and others

Locations: South Island centres and Online

Cost: Paid in full by students

Information from Mile Parr, Primary Portfolio Tutor.  For the Lincoln Regional Diploma in Agriculture, all the learning material is in a 'course textbook' and the students have access to the web-site.  The Polytechnic offers a support tutorial class for the enrolled students, run any tests, labs and final exams for local regional students of Lincoln.
 

             
Dairy Training Ltd (DTL).

< http://www.dairynz.co.nz>

Dairy Training Ltd (arm of DairyNZ) delivers training for the dairy industry.

Accredited for NZQA to deliver Units at levels 2 -6.

Main courses:

Locations: Sites throughout NZ except bottom of South Island.

Cost: Paid half by employer and half by government. Participant may refund employer.

atcTrainME

PTE. Accredited for NZQA Units level 2.

Main Courses: Dairy farming and range of general subjects.

Locations:  Waikato centres, South Auckland and Christchurch

Cost: No fees. Paid by government.

Telford Farm Training Institute

< http://www.telford.ac.nz>

PTE. Accredited for NZQA Units level 2-6.

Lincoln University Diploma in Agriculture (non NZQA Units).

Location: Balclutha and correspondence courses.

Cost: Paid in full by participant.

Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre

PTE. Accredited for NZQA Units level 2-6.

Lincoln and Massey University Diploma in Agriculture (non NZQA Units).

Main courses: Dairy, beef, sheep, deer and others.

Location: Masterton, Rodney (Auckland), Taranaki, Hawke’s Bay, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Northland.

Cost:  Paid in full by participant.

Waipoa Farm Cadet Training Trust.

PTE Accredited with NZQA Units level 2 ?.

Two year residential.

Main courses:  Beef, sheep, shearing.

Location: Gisborne

Fees:  Paid in full by participant.

Smedley Station and Cadet training Farm

<www.smedley.ac.nz>

PTE Accredited with NZQA Units at level 2 ?.

Two year residential.

Main courses: Beef, sheep, shearing.

Location: Central Hawke’s Bay

Fees: Paid in full by participant.

High schools

Courses taught by approved NZQA providers covering NZQA Units 2

S.T.A.R courses as tasters

 In the stupid competitive environment set up under government policy in the 1980s, the drive was to get as many EFTSs as possible. The Waikato Polytech Dairy Farm Trainee (DFT) course I taught for new entrants counted as 0.6 of an EFTS.  The course was ideal for farmers  with students starting at the Polytech in late January, to be ready for calving on June 1.  Farmers claimed it was an excellent qualification for their needs, and operated for years before it had to be changed to NZQA Units.

Our bureaucrats then started dreaming up ways to ‘stretch’ an EFTS, by giving students written assignments to do on the farm (during calving believe it or not!), and then come back to class for more lectures immediately after calving to claim a full EFTS from government.  It was going to be easy money for the Polytech, but was crazy as it was the last thing farmers wanted, as work didn’t stop after calving.  But then the bureaucrats had never done a calving, and the last people to be consulted were employers!  It was all about keeping the Polytech in business.

But it got worse. Certificates from Polytechs were then stretched into Diplomas, and Diplomas stretched into degrees!  Polytechs giving degrees in my view was bad enough, but then higher degrees were even offered, which made a total mockery because in agriculture, Polytechs didn’t have research facilities or qualified staff to meet the academic standards required.

No market research

Providers never appeared to do any market research to check demand before setting up teaching facilities, and just expected students to turn up. Then if they didn’t, the institutions complained to the government, or anybody else who they hoped would bail them out with more money.  Lincoln University has just done this.

Lincoln has itself to blame, with the current Vice Chancellor appointing three assistant VCs as soon as he got there. The whole situation should never have been allowed to get this way, with students/learners being the ones to suffer by having to face rising fees, massive loans and questionable teaching standards, from dwindling staff who were made redundant to help meet the bills.  Lincoln should have remained a college of the University of Canterbury and stuck to it’s old and highly respected core business.  Now it’s part of a much lauded ‘hub’ to add more complications to it’s future.

And now Lincoln University starting to teach their agricultural qualifications, do research, and provide industry demonstrations on the farm of St Peter’s school in Cambridge, which makes no sense for them to spend their reducing money in the Waikato.  It’s a great idea to get high school students interested in agriculture at an early age, but the local DairyNZ staff and the Waikato University agribusiness faculty could have provided all the help the school needed, all under the supervision of the PrimaryITO.  St Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton is doing just this, using local support to promote agribusiness.

Dollars wasted

The Waikato Polytech where I worked from 1993-2000 must have wasted hundreds of thousands of tax payer’ dollars on ‘memoranda of understanding’ with other NZ Polytechs, and opening ‘campuses’ in other locations in competition with the local teaching organisations. 

The cost of the many trips by bureaucrats and senior staff to China and India to do the same fortunately is well buried and forgotten. They all came to naught.  Nobody got the chop of course, as it was government policy and was encouraged, and it still seems to be going on.  The Waikato Polytech (now Wintec) ended up closing their formal agriculture (and equine) courses some years ago, which shows how much they understood industry needs in the region – which is what Polytechs were supposed to be good at!

At one stage the Waikato Polytechnic bureaucrats worked on a deal for us to teach the long-established and much revered Massey Diploma in Agriculture to tap the local market.  I was asked (wearing my Ph.D.) to make a few trips to Massey to talk to their key staff involved in the Diploma, where it soon became obvious that there was no way we had the qualified staff or the facilities to teach the Massey Dip.  I got very stressed on return, trying to get this simple fact through to the bureaucrats, (especially our Dean), who had little idea about agriculture or the respect the Massey Diploma had gained in the farming community over 70+ years.

Our bureaucrats were clearly not concerned about the quality of education, and only about getting more local bums on seats. To my great relief, the idea died a natural death, after wasting what must have been many thousands of taxpayers’ dollars. The bureaucrats moved on to their next pie in the sky which was overseas students.

Distance learning

In the early days of the internet in education, too many NZ teaching institutions (especially Polytechs), and not just in agriculture, initially saw ‘distance learning’ as a cheap way to earn more fees from more students for less work, with no proof of clients getting value for money. They just didn’t put enough support into it – probably because they didn’t appreciate at that stage what was involved.

Organisations designing ‘distant learning’ options didn’t realise how much work had to go into preparing top-notch material, and the support needed to go along with it.  It wasn’t just mailing out printed lecture notes, handouts and PowerPoint slides.  This happened with a friend who in 2012 did a post graduate teaching Diploma from a noted NZ University, where she was charged the same fees as students who attended daily lectures.  She was ripped off for sure.

The New Zealand Uni boffins have been slow to learn from major world universities in UK and the USA currently providing on-line programmes at no cost which receive plenty of compliments from users I have talked to - and who all want to do more! This is becoming a booming business and can only grow with the power of the Internet for generations who have been weaned on to technology. New Zealand needs to take a giant leap forward into this.

As far as using modern technology is concerned, primary education in New Zealand is still an antiquated bureaucratic muddle. 

Memorable tutors

I love asking students I meet about their lecturers, tutors, supervisors and teaching methods being used, to see how things have changed since my years of suffering as a Farm Institute and then University student, and then inflicting more pain on others in my 8 years as a University lecturer, and 7 years as a Polytech tutor – getting my own back! 

Clearly little has changed since the ancient Greeks invented the lecture where literate teachers informed illiterate audiences. If you attend any public talk or lecture today, where the majority will be using ‘death by PowerPoint’, you’ll see that nothing has changed.  The speaker puts up a PP slide and then reads it to the audience – who can all read for themselves.  The sad thing is that none of us in the audience complains – we sit there checking our watches, our brains miles away thinking about something different.  Research has shown that it’s mainly sex!  A friend suggested that we should all read aloud the words on the slides with the lecturer.

 With all the resources now on the Internet, and with all that could be added to assist agricultural learning, the chances of learning in a small group at an interactive computer screen must be thousands of times better than listening to a lecturer moaning on for hours.

What's your tutor's name?

Regularly, students I ask only know their tutors’ first name, and Uni students I talk to rarely know the name of their HOD or Dean, and certainly they have never met their Vice Chancellor or CEO.  One management student recently, majoring in Human Resources (who failed my ‘who is your HOD’ test), told me that they get visits from important guest lecturers – but when asked she couldn’t remember their names.  Then she reassured me they get a lot of information from the Internet – which did not inspire my confidence.

Clearly the top brass never sit in on random lectures, or pop into the cafeteria to chat and sample their wares.  They are probably in meetings with  hired consultants who have never stood in front of a class.

Agricultural education in New Zealand. 5. Better ways needed for learning

 

 By Dr Clive Dalton

A new approach is URGENT

New Zealand’s primary industries should be screaming for a new approach to education, using every possible aspect of the Internet access aided by ultra fast fibre. What we are using today is already old technology. The big problem for our future exports is that we are suffering badly from DKDK  (don’t know what we don’t know) to meet future technical and economic challenges.

KDK (know what we don’t know) is bad enough if we are honest enough to admit it, but many aren’t, and there are few signs in overall Ag learning to get action to fix things.  You rarely see this subject raised in the farming media by industry commentators, or what the PrimaryITO is planning to do. 

Farming just seems to accept that the status quo is OK as nobody is complaining and demanding more money and resources from the government where the Minister of Agriculture is around 13^th in the caucus pecking order.  PrimaryITO staff have to spend far too much valuable time finding enough students to fill classes, and then make sure they attend to complete their NZQA Units.  In my Polytech days we were buried in paper concerning the NZQA farming Units, and I suspect it’s no better now.

But would current Ag educators welcome drastic change, as it will commit the old ways to the scrap heap. I'm sure they would.  The variation between tutors’ ability and resources at their disposal over the country was always an  issue, and the bureaucrat's answer was 'moderation' where tutors would meet and marks compared.  It drove most tutors mad with the paper work and waste of time involved.

more use of the Internet and sharing of the best national resources available is the obvious way to help this.  Thankfully it’s starting to happen – but far too slowly to meet the 2015 targets.

When I was interviewed for the job of Assistant University Lecturer’s, I was never asked if I could teach, or even if I liked young people.  It was assumed that if I had tertiary qualifications I could teach, which is both arrogant and outrageous.  And it’s equally dangerous to assume that any qualified technical person can teach in a way that students can learn from them.  Finding out is the hard part – and is often take as being too hard, so everything just carries on the way it has done in the past.  This won’t do for the needs of 2025.

As you age in teaching, it’s easy to assume that what you know now will get you through, without the chore and more likely humiliation, of having to retrain. Imagine if you couldn’t cope and were found out!  I had this experience after retirement on the Polytech IT course when I struggled among a class of folk who had done very little academic work.  I got so frustrated by seeing far better ways to teach things, that were easier for us dummies to learn.  But again, nobody complained about the tutors or the organisation.

This hope of not having to update is also common with scientists, when faced with ever increasing numbers of published papers to read, with statistical techniques that we don’t understand and dare not take on trust.  We rarely bother to try and understand them, and are always reluctant to find somebody (younger) to explain them to us.  What would happen to our ego?

Many of us think that we don’t want any more technology, even if others say we need it, as we can’t handle what we’ve got already.  And making things work is frequently far too difficult, with manuals generally of little help beyond the ‘quick start’ page. And even that page needs reading about ten times.

When you have found out how to use something by trial and error, you then find that the manual or the ‘Dummies Guide’ is helpful.  The only hope is to get one-to-one help from someone still at school – while reminding them all the time to go slowly, and repeat things again – and again.  Or get help from the Internet.

Urgent actions needed to meet 2025 targets

Individual learning

People have differing learning abilities, and people in employment have different work and family responsibilities. Everyone in education knows this, so learners are going to learn better if they can have their individual needs met, provided they get help when needed to avoid getting discouraged.  Too much failure leads to frustration and puts learners off, especially if there’s a time limit on their learning.

Professor Sugata Mitra did some amazing research in deprived areas of India with his ‘hole in the wall experiment’, where nobody had ever gone to school and nobody would go to teach.  He stuck a computer in a wall down town like an ATM and left it, knowing that in no time kids would gather around and start pressing keys to see what appeared on the screen. He secretly observed what went on over a period of months.

The kids gathered in droves to press keys and help each other, and surprisingly nobody vandalised the machine.  So in no time they had learned how to work the computer and use it to find information.  Some had even learned English from it.  See link below.  It’s mind blowing.

https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=TED%20Prof%20Sugata%20Mitra

So the message is that young folk will learn what they see a need for, and especially if learning has a strong element of fun and reward.  And they love learning from each other – helping, challenging and celebrating success in learning. The good news is that this is going on in an increasing number of New Zealand primary schools with full use of computers and other support equipment, and continuing up the system into higher learning. It’s an IT world already; so all schools need all the technology they need.    It shouldn’t depend on parents to provide this.

Young folk today are not afraid to make mistakes using computers, which is in direct contrast to the older generation who were brought up in an age of the teachers’ feared red pen, marking large crosses to show that you got it wrong - again.  It engendered fear of failure, and took all the fun out of learning.  Looking back on my school days, fear of failure and it’s consequences was sadly the main driver. 

So the obvious solution is to organise – or let learners organise themselves, joint sessions with friends, peers, mentors, employers, coaches, or anybody else they trust, to learn using the Internet what they see is needed to advance their Ag careers.  They could race through the material very quickly and keep moving on.