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The goals and objectives of CariPac are to harness research and education to help address local food, agricultural, and environmental needs; support local economic growth; and to prepare students to achieve their own personal career goals. To do this, CariPac is striving to help meet workplace needs through increasing the quality of undergraduate instruction, by developing new methods for delivering instruction, modernizing instructional technologies and methodologies; updating courses and improving disciplinary students' analytical interpersonal, leadership, communications, problem-solving, computational, and decision-making skills and abilities. <P>The basic theme throughout all CariPac institutions is: To strengthen our academic program offerings through increasing the technological capacity of the member institutions. To further develop the professional and global competencies of students from institutions within the Insular Area. To increase enrollment and retention in the agriculture and food science programs we offer in our institutions. To build a stronger curriculum that has student learning outcomes that are tied to program outcomes and possible college or university-wide student outcomes. Finally, we seek to produce students to help meet workplace needs through increasing the quality of both undergraduate and graduate instruction and build greater teaching capacities for our current and future faculties. By developing new methods for delivering instruction, modernizing instructional technologies and methodologies; updating courses and improving disciplinary students' analytical interpersonal, leadership, communications, problem-solving, computational, and decision-making skills and abilities - we will change archaic educational practices to a more robust pedagogy linked to measured outcomes.
Non-Technical Summary:<br/>
The rationale for the project is to be able to share resources and build economies of scale between the 4-year and 2-year institutions in the Caribbean and Pacific. The CariPac consortium is hoping to develop a program for distance education in the Caribbean and Pacific that is modelled after the Regents Online program or other similar programs. The Regents Online program is comprised of universities, community college, and technology centers across the state of Tennesseeto provide students with either an undergraduate or graduate degree delivered in the online environment. This is just one of many models but captures the spirit of what the CariPac consortium is attempting to accomplish. While bringing this model to fruition is our long-term goal, there are several steps that must be put in place before the model can become reality for the CariPac institutions and relies heavily on the combined efforts and resources of all. In the interim each institution has assessed their institutions technical capacity to receive and deliver online courses. Building the technical infrastructure for the CariPac institutions has been the focus of earlier grant awards. As you can imagine this has been a long journey for some of our consortium members, as they had poor technical infrastructure and limited access to resources such as bandwidth. The CariPac consortium is now in a position to begin developing the strategic plan for implementing a distance education program that will provide access for theCariPac institutions and their students. Additionally, some of the CariPac institutions do not have the financial or human resources to deliver online courses. It would be through the CariPac consortium and the distance education program that each member institution could benefit from the resources of the other institutions in the form of faculty resources, faculty expertise, and faculty development opportunities.
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Approach:<br/>
This Consortium project will be administered by Dr. Christy Vineyard, Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Professor of Business at the University of the Virgin Islands. Dr. Vineyard will be the Principal Investigator. All business transactions will be passed through the University of the Virgin Islands Grants Office. The CariPac consortium will hire one assessment consultant for this grant. In addition, the-subgrantees will have at least one Co-PI that is responsible for all plan operations and methodologies at their specific site.