We are creating new materials and approaches for promoting collaborative instructional programs and research projects that will effectively address the growing worldwide challenge to develop new food and fiber production systems that also maintain healthy ecosystems and viable rural livelihoods. An Internet-based platform has been designed that efficiently and effectively connects students, researchers, and practitioners to examine case studies of "real-world" conservation and sustainable development issues.

Rural landscapes must provide food and fiber products and deliver environmental services required to sustain both human life and biodiversity. How we reconcile the conflicting needs of meeting growing food and fiber demands while maintaining healthy ecosystems will be the central challenge facing agriculture and natural resource professionals throughout the 21st century. Narrowly focused education and research must change, because this challenge requires that multiple disciplines work together to create innovative solutions. To this end, we are building an online educational/research network designed to be incorporated into existing university curricula in multiple disciplines.
An Internet-based platform will link students, professors, researchers, and practitioners to examine "real-world" issues related to conservation and sustainable development. It will do this by providing a flexible infrastructure for creating case studies and the communication tools required to collaborate on problem-solving exercises and high-priority research questions that arise from the case study areas. Multimedia cases will be developed illustrating the complex relationships between food systems, livelihood security, and the environment in the United States and overseas. Cases will highlight a wide variety of challenges and innovations in maintaining healthy landscapes, making them relevant to multiple disciplines, including agriculture, forestry, wildlife conservation, and rural development.

A beta version of the Internet-based platform was designed to facilitate communication within a network of conservation-oriented practitioners, researchers, and students. The platform, ConservationBridge.org, was populated with six case studies specifically developed for the system, two from the United States, two from Kenya, and one each from China and Bhutan. Each case used text, video, and photography to provide context and background and included research questions posed by practitioners working at each case site. The platform also featured tools that enable asynchronous as well as real-time communication to encourage collaboration in ways similar to Facebook and Wikipedia.
It was used in fall semester 2007 in an upper-division international conservation course offered by the Department of Natural Resources to test its instructional functionality with 24 students. Student teams researched the questions from the practitioners and posted their responses on the platform to initiate discussion and dialog within the network. This experience is being used to expand the use of this approach to ecoagriculture.

The beta version of the Internet platform was a very effective instructional tool in an upper-division course with 24 students, which was offered during fall semester 2007. The course, International Conservation, had used case studies before, but this new approach provided a much more realistic and relevant classroom setting. Student evaluations specific to the use of the platform were administered through an online survey testing how well the system created an authentic learning environment. Results indicated that the system increased the students’ sense of engagement with the course (75 percent agree or strongly agree), increased the students’ level of participation (81 percent), enhanced collaboration (69 percent), and increased the students’ motivation to learn and complete their work (75 percent).
This experience has stimulated interest from a number of Cornell departments (Crop and Soil Science, Applied Economics and Management, Development Sociology) and elsewhere (University of California at Berkley, University of Washington, North Carolina State University, Escuela Agrícola Panamericana Zamorano, Beijing Normal University, Bahir Dar University) in possibly using the platform and/or building cases for it. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service and several nongovernmental organizations (Centro Ecologico, Brazil; the Nature Conservancy, China, United States; World Agoforestry Centre, China; E. L. Rose Conservancy, Pennsylvania) are committed to helping to design and complete additional cases and to being part of the growing network.

conservation and sustainable development