2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Students studying horticulture typically desire hands-on, experiential learning opportunities, and yet many of these students are enrolled in online classes or degree programs. Thus, the challenge as an online horticulture instructor is to develop experiential learning opportunities for the online environment. Plants, Landscapes, and the Environment is a new introductory course at the University of Nebraska with an online audience of 50 to 75 students each semester. My goal was to develop an experiential learning activity in this course that would increase student confidence in and knowledge about: 1) sustainability tradeoffs in crop production systems, 2) the scientific method, and 3) data analysis and interpretation. To accomplish this goal, I created the Sustainable Lettuce Competition where online students work in teams to make evidence-based management decisions for a greenhouse lettuce crop and compete with their peers (and instructor) to achieve the best balance of productivity, input use efficiency, and profitability. The suite of management choices for each team constitute one treatment in a virtual cropping systems experiment (with instructor choices serving as the best management practice control) that is carried out on campus by the instructors. Students receive weekly video and photo updates, which provide engaged opportunities to teach about the scientific method, crop production, and unique biological phenomena, all under the guise and spirit of the competition. At the end of the experiment, students receive harvest weight data for every lettuce plant across all teams, and use this data to calculate sustainability metrics, create and interpret figures to test their original hypotheses about each management choice, and ultimately crown a Sustainable Lettuce Champion. Learning outcomes for the inaugural Sustainable Lettuce Competition were measured by student performance on the assignment and a survey of students’ perceptions of their learning. Students correctly calculated 84% of means and standard errors for sustainability metrics, and 90% of students successfully interpreted that data to identify the teams with the most sustainable management approach. In the learning outcome survey, 83% of students agreed that the competition increased their knowledge about sustainability tradeoffs in crop production systems. Overall, the Sustainable Lettuce Competition was fun for students (and the instructor), promoted regular interaction among peers and the instructor, and most importantly, results suggest it successfully increased knowledge of the scientific method, data analysis and interpretation, and sustainability tradeoffs in agriculture.