Designing a bridge to cross the urban–rural divide

Written by guest blogger Stuart Barber.

In many Western societies, the percentage of the population in rural areas has been declining and urban areas increasing over several decades. This results in a lower percentage of the population having a direct relationship with food and fibre production or understanding its origins and processes both on farm and post-farm. Unless veterinary schools institute targeted selection criteria around agricultural background or experience, this means that most students entering veterinary degrees, and often agricultural degrees, have limited farming knowledge. When I returned to teach at the University of Melbourne after working in mixed practice and farm consulting, it became clear that there were far fewer students with any direct farm contact, or even people they knew from farms, compared to when I had been a student. This agrees with survey outcomes from groups such as the Primary Industries Education Foundation Australia on secondary school student agricultural knowledge.

While we instituted a range of teaching to support learning such as experiential on-farm visits, we remained constrained in our ability to enable students to fully visualize seasonal or yearly changes on farms — critical in most extensive production systems. Our article on development of the 4D Virtual Farms describes the process for how we collaboratively developed virtual reality farms with five veterinary schools, which allowed students to look at farm enterprises across Australasia through time and different paddocks/areas across each property. The key requirements for the virtual farms were accessibility across all standard devices and operating systems, from laptops and mobile devices to head-mounted displays. Rather than solely developing a range of random 360-degree images, the site of image collection was chosen in conjunction with a local veterinarian and farmer to illustrate the required learning outcomes for each enterprise and allow the user to explore each image at their own pace. This was vital, as a visitor to the farm may have little understanding of events likely to occur across the annual calendar.

The general philosophy behind producing the 4D Virtual Farms used a design-based research (DBR) approach. This DBR approach with iterative feedback fr

om the team allowed the production of 11 farms including beef, lamb, wool, dairy, and pork enterprises from Australia to New Zealand. These farms can be used as a standalone website or inserted into learning management systems. The general approach used to develop this virtual resource has utility across a range of other veterinary and agricultural applications, as well as other industries, as the collaborative nature of the project allows for sharing of technical resources and a much broader outcome of enterprises for students. More work is needed to complete this DBR process to evaluate the effectiveness of the bridge in enabling students to understand more about rural enterprises. However, the use of the 4D Virtual Farms has occurred across all Australasian veterinary schools since the project initiation and became a very useful resource during the COVID-19 pandemic.

STUART BARBER is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Veterinary School, University of Melbourne in Australia. He has worked as a mixed veterinary practitioner, in contract research, managing research funding portfolios and consulting to sheep and beef producers in SE Australia. Since commencing his teaching career, he has taught predominantly in the first two preclinical years of the veterinary science degree. His current research interests are in production animal health and management and in veterinary education, particularly the use of extended reality.