USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA -ARS), which shares a cooperative and administrative responsibility at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center-Burns, an OSU Experiment Station (They are original partners of the science-based framework that served as the basis for the threat- based land management tool.) The Nature Conservancy played an important role in the project. They contracted an incredible artist who rendered the drawings and animation that serve as the visual ecological foundation within the TBLM tool. Our project demonstrated aligned goals among all the partners and served as a framework for furthering our partnerships with these agencies and organizations. The result will be a tool that can be used to help develop land management plans for the purpose of improving and maintaining sage-grouse habitat.
Leadership Development
One of the greatest challenges facing Extension educators is balancing the task at hand with other job responsibilities as they arise.
To promote transparency and accountability, GEP our team leaders followed recommended practices promoted in the book “The Four Disciplines of Execution,” by Sean Covey. As suggested by Covey, the team met every other week for 30 minutes to review what they committed to the group and to identify what each team member planned to do for the following two weeks. The accountability provided encouragement for other team members since we were all working together on deliverables. There was transparency because we all identified what we were committing to for upcoming weeks, and we reflected on whether we fulfilled that commitment to the team. Reflection also played an important role in this project. Our reflection process began when we were paired with the instructional designer provided by PACE. One of our greatest challenges developing the Extension curriculum was that we did not have a clear and conventional system to save new documents, images, and videos. Since the inception of the course in 2016, OSU has gone through multiple cloud services. During our NTAE project, OSU provided access to a proprietary business communication platform and all of our content was saved in a central location. Once we connected with an instructional designer, we were able to build a more solid workflow and the framework we needed to bring all the content together. The instructional designer and the backward planning process guided by our team’s catalyst proved pivotal to our project. Each provided a framework that set us on a trajectory to accomplish what we wanted to do.
Part 4: Impact and Reflection
In this section of the e Publication we’ll share results and outcomes related to the course, lessons learned, our assumptions going into the project, and important things others should consider if they plan to innovate curriculum.
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