A THREE YEAR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF IFAPA'S ONLINE TRAINING PROGRAM

As a the agricultural research and extension branch of the Andalusian government, the Instituto de Investigacion y Formacion Agraria y Pesquera (IFAPA) is developing a range of research, technology transfer and training activities to promote the modernization of the Andalusian Agriculture, Fisheries and Food sector, and to guarantee the correct implementation of Common Agricultural Policy directives. Here we focus on IFAPA's training program, especially its e-learning or online training program. In the Agricultural sector, this kind of information and communication technology (ICT) based activities are quite uncommon. Therefore a general view of how IFAPA's e-learning program is implemented and performs might be relevant for professional adult trainers elsewhere. In this paper we provide a summary of how IFAPA's traditional training model was transferred to the e-learning platform, and analyse how the teaching and training activities have evolved since then. Special attention is paid to tracking the changing use and profile of the participants of the training activities, identifying which training programs are more useful, recognizing which training programs are being used most efficiently, comparing the evolution of institutional training versus specialized training, and at the same time also identifying the causes of these changes.