Ivor Pennicooke, one of 30 students who did the course in organic farming put on by IICA's Agri-Distance Learning and Training Centre, accepts his certificate from Dr Joan Neil, local representative of the Organisation of American States. Fifty students overall graduated after doing four different agricultural courses at the organisation.

FIFTY students, who received a substantial amount of their course material on CD-ROM and had to do on-line research on a range of agricultural developments, last week became the first batch of graduates under a distance learning project run by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture. IICA established its Agri-Distance Learning and Training Centre (at its Hope Gardens office in late 2000 and since then has developed a range of multimedia courses for delivery mainly by CD-ROM and via the Internet.

The programme got support from the Organisation of American States (OAS).

The agency said that the centre was seen as a way of providing learning opportunities more flexibly to a broad spectrum of people, with varied educational backgrounds and from different parts of the island.

The first set of courses, which ran for four months, were:

* an introduction to e-commerce farm management;

* health and occupational safety for entrepreneurs;

* information and extension methods in agriculture; and

* organic farming for entrepreneurs.

Most of the participants already were in agriculture.

"The students were given the multimedia CD-ROMs to work on their own but were required to attend tutorials," explained one participant.

Said IICA: " The teaching and learning methods employed by the ADLTC allow students a greater degree of flexibility in their studies and encourage them to grasp up-to-date knowledge in the specific area, while gaining valuable hands-on experience using modern, state-of-the-art technology."

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World