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The following describes an innovation. Region: Northeast |
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Main contact information for this innovation: Jon Emigh Main contact job title / position: Business Operations Manager Main contact number: 229 Ag Admin Bldg., University Park, PA 16902, phone 814-867-1816 Main contact email address: jxe122@psu.edu |
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Innovation name: Atlas Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: Atlas is a fully integrated business platform and product development strategy. The business platform seamlessly integrates a content management system, e-commerce system, customer relation management system, on-line registration system and on-line course development system. The customer that access the website never knows which system he or she is in a a given time. The product development strategy in called "Stage Gate" and provides a way to prioritize the need and quality of a given product for development. |
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Notes from phone interview: That's probably in my mind the framework for all the innovation that we're hoping to do in the future. It in itself is an innovation, I think, in terms of how extension organizations approach the future. What we've been doing is really taking several different systems out there and integrating those into a comprehensive business platform for extension itself. I think part of what we're doing is we're approaching extension as a business and not just an academic endeavor by moving forward. What we're doing is with the Atlas system, which is basically just a name given to what we're trying to do here, is it's taking five different platforms and integrating those into one platform, and those are-- we're using Plone as a content management system to build our webpage around. We're then using Magenta, which is a e-commerce system, and we're putting the customer relations management system into that, which is Salesforce, and we are-- have an online registration system - Cvent, and a Moodle we're using for online course development. The innovation there is all of those are seamlessly integrated so you never know which one you're in at any point in time. If you enter our extension through our website, you come to that portal, you can go there and in the new structure that we're putting out there, you can easily find everything we have to offer on whatever topic you want. That includes whether you want events to go, whether you want publications, if you want articles, videos, whatever product line we have to offer. You can do a one-stop shop. You can come in and click a couple boxes, it pulls it all up, and you can see everything that's out there, whether it's free, whether it's for sale, where it's going to be, when it's going to be. If you decide you want to register for it, it automatically kicks you into the event registration system, you go ahead and register, and it keeps you informed of when an event's coming up, and reminds you that you need to get ready to go that. So it's all one system to the outside user, even though there's multiple platforms that're integrated behind that. We also hired a group called Sparks to come in and actually help us design this system, and do the integration of that. They come in and implement cognitive psychology approaches, they interview our customers, they actually track where people look on the screen, and it maximise-- taking their eye movement where you want them to go to. It also helped design it such that the customer can easily find the path where they want to go, then they track customers to see how-- what percentage of them find it in the time that you're hoping that they'll get there. So it's a very sophisticated system, and it's going to be one that we're moving forward. We showed the prototype at our annual meeting a couple weeks ago, and our target is to implement it fully this fall with the new product line in there. I think the other piece of that is the products themselves. We've actually implemented a product development strategy. It's a stage gate process that we have to vet it to make sure that the products fit our needs, and then we invest in the development of those products internally, within the organization. We've set up specific product lines. We have Learn Now videos, and How To videos, and e-books, and apps, types of things that we're building across all of our program areas. The other piece of it behind it-- because of the customer relations management thing, it's all about programming but behind that we're keeping all this data, so all of a sudden we have data to make sounder decisions from at the administrative level. So in this customer relations management system, as we get information we'll have the ability to do the analytics on that. We'll have somebody on staff that does that, and we'll be able to track how any given program or any given product is performing out there, and how people like it, if they don't like it, if we need to do something different. We'll have a dashboard on our computer that I can sit there and look and see whether we're going where we thought we wanted to be going, or whether we're bottlenecked and something's not happening. Then everybody in the system will have different levels of access to that data as they run the programs and everything else. |
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The following describes an innovation. Region: Northeast |
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Main contact information for this innovation: Tom Butzler Main contact job title / position: Extension Educator Main contact number: 47 Cooperation Lane, Mill Hall, PA 17751-8978, 570-726-0022 Main contact email address: tmb124@psu.edu |
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Innovation name: Beekeeping 101 Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: Beekeeping 101 is an on-line 10 module course for beginner Beekeepers. |
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Notes from phone interview: Beekeeping 101 was-- started out as an experiment. I used to have a dual appointment to the Dean of the college here as Director of Extension, but I was also an Associate Vice President of Outreach and worked with our outreach colleagues over in Public Media. We posed the idea of taking extension content and putting into a package at a real high level, so what we did was we worked with our Public Media World Campus group over there to say what would happen if we build a high-end program, tried something totally new, and invested in that? We figured out the full cost of this system is probably about $200,000, so it was really a pretty big risk and it was a fairly extensive risk, but we split that risk between Public Media and ourself at Outreach. And some of that's certainly people's salaries and stuff that put their time into doing it, so the overall amount was probably not more than 50 to 100,000 from both of us, which is still a fair amount. So we took this experiment, we worked with them, and we built a ten-module series on beginner beekeeping. You can go online, type in Beekeeping 101, and pull it up, give you a little trailer of what that looks like and everything, if you just want to get a sense of what the product-- but it's very slick. It's almost like something you'd see on TV or something. You go through there and it leads people through that. So again, it's back to that innovation. I think it really comes down to everything that's in there, you can go on the Web and get it for free, wouldn't cost you a dime, or you can go buy a book and read about it and learn about it all as well. Why would somebody pay-- I think we're marketing it at $129 per participant, and we've had over 1,000 people over the course, probably about-- we're probably up to 1,300 or more people who are signed up for this thing over the course of two-and-a-half years, more than earning back the $200,000 we put into it. Now we're on the side that income that comes in now at this point goes into the kitty to help support new innovations and do other sorts of things. It's really a nice, nice example of what can be done, but it's also an example of something that's very expensive. If you spent 200,000 and failed in any one system, that would be a big deal. |
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The following describes an innovation. Region: Northeast |
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Main contact information for this innovation: Kerry Richards Main contact job title / position: Director of Pesticide Education Program Main contact number: 221 Special Services Bldg., University Park, PA 16802, 814-665-2134 Main contact email address: kmh14@psu.edu |
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Innovation name: Pesticide Education Program Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: The Pesticide Education Program uses multiple technologies, including a number of social media to reach a broad base of audiences |
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Notes from phone interview: I think I put that one in there primarily because the individuals that are running that program have been innovative in terms of trying a lot of different media, a lot of different approaches, experimenting with social media in terms of helping get that message out there. They're using Twitter, using Facebook, using a number of different media to try to get people engaged in what they're doing. Doing a lot of online videos. I wouldn't say it was the highest level of innovation but at the same token, I think what was important to me was that they weren't stuck in the old ways here, and they were willing to try some new things and see where it took them, and that sort of thing. They've been doing that-- I mean, the other piece of it too is it's kind of multiple levels. We're also working very hard with our Hispanic audiences out there, because a lot of the farm workers now are Hispanic in Pennsylvania and therefore they're the ones most at risk of handling pesticides, but also they're the ones that if they don't handle it right put the rest of us at risk, too. I think taking these approaches and then working with a Hispanic audience out there to get them better trained has been an innovation on our end here in Pennsylvania, anyway. |
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The following describes an innovation. Region: Northeast |
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Main contact information for this innovation: Robert Goodling Main contact job title / position: Extension Associate Main contact number: Main contact email address: rcg133@psu.edu |
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Innovation name: DairyCents Mobile App Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: The DairyCents mobile app calculates income over feed costs and compares prices of various forages, grains and commodities to the Penn State Feed Price List. NEW! DairyCents Pro - calculate your own income over feed cost and track other feed management metrics. |
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Notes from phone interview: But basically I think the innovation there is it's a system that's really designed to help our dairy farmers around Pennsylvania and even beyond go through and look at their farm budget in terms of dairy production. It really comes down and starts looking at what's the biggest limitation in your production. It helps them key in on that and then talk about what it is that they can do to maybe improve their bottom line. It does some calculations but provides some other types of help in there as well. I don't want to get into it too far because I'm not-- I'm almost to the point of guessing a little bit about what all it does inside there, so I don't want to overstate. But it's online, it's a downloadable app that they can work through and work with our dairy team with that particular area. |
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The following describes an innovation. Region: Northeast |
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Main contact information for this innovation: Winifred Mc Gee Main contact job title / position: Extension Educator Main contact number: 717-921-8803 X118 Main contact email address: wwm1@psu.edu |
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Innovation name: Hispanic Workforce Training Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: This effort uses a Spanish translation system to work with farm workers and farmers to provide extension education and farm business information. |
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Notes from phone interview: We also have a group that has a new and beginning farmer grant that they just received, working with our Hispanic workforce down in south-east part of the State, across a number of our issues - tree, fruit, mushrooms, dairy, a number of them down there. Really what they've done is we went out and purchased a translation software for them that they use when they do some of this training, and also are working with some people that can do the actual personal translation as well. But they've really been targeting that audience and working with them, and just the workforce but there's also a subset of that group that's also beginning to move in and become landowners and farmers on their own right. So it's really there to help them understand the business environment, how to be successful in those arenas as well. I think I'm very supportive of it because it-- for several reasons. One is that the Hispanic workforce is a key to success in a number of different things we do out there. One is food safety's a big issue with FISMA coming online right now. Who's out in the field handling the fruit and harvesting it and doing that, working through the system? Same way in the mushroom industry, which by the way Pennsylvania's the number one button mushroom producer in the United States, All down about one or two counties down the south-east part of the State there. So these are big issues and big industries for us in Pennsylvania, so we're worried about how they handle pesticides from food safety perspective. We're worried about their own personal sanitation as they're out harvesting and working in the fields, their understanding of issues that can lead to contamination of food. It becomes very important for us to successfully help with those kind of problems here in the State. It's also about economic community development, which is another big issue for us in terms of helping those industries continue to thrive but also that next generation of Hispanic workers that tend to become-- start to become some of the farmers themself. Then from another perspective, if you look at the age structure of the Hispanic population in the United States it's heavy on the young side, which is different from African-Americans or the Eastern/Western European populations, or any of the other ones, in that there's going to be a lot of those kids that're going to be potential students for Penn State in the future. So helping them, their families be successful and helping them grow I think could then be useful both on the extension but on the resident education side of the organization as well moving ahead. So that's a big part of the reason. |