Introduction and guidance
Welcome to this free course, Creating innovative agricultural advisory services through a Living Lab. It is an outcome of the EU-funded AgriLink [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] project which ran from 2017 to 2021. The goal of AgriLink (Agricultural Knowledge: Linking farmers, advisors and researchers to boost innovation) was to stimulate transitions towards more sustainable European agricultures by:
a) furthering the understanding of the roles played by a wide range of advisory organisations in farmer decision-making
b) enhancing their contribution to learning and innovation.
One part of the project was to run six Living Labs across seven different European countries to test whether the Living Lab approach boosts the development of innovative services for farmers. So, in our Living Labs, we developed real innovatory support services for agriculture. This course encapsulates the main processes and findings from the collective experiences of those Living Labs as well as using or drawing upon many documents and publications produced by the project.
The course is divided into eight sessions, with approximately one hour of study for each session. So, allow at least ten hours overall to complete your studies. You can work through the course at your own pace; you can do one session per day or week, or you can push on to complete the whole course in a day. Whatever approach you use, we recommend that you plan your studies carefully.
Glossary
There is a glossary of key terms and their definitions available for your information.
Throughout the course, these glossary terms are also highlighted in the text. When you click on one, a definition for that term appears.
You can find examples of this in the next paragraph – design thinking and systems thinking.
This course may present you with challenges. You may be unfamiliar with Living Labs and the approaches covered such as design thinking and systems thinking. You may not have studied via online or distance learning before. You may also have your own personal expectations of what you want to achieve through studying this topic. You may want to study with colleagues rather than on your own. Some of the questions you have about Living Labs may not be answered until the final session or until you start working on one yourself. But this course does provide you with the first steps in your learning journey.
By studying this course, you shouldn’t expect to be able to go straight out and set up a Living Lab, but it should give you an in-depth introduction to them and prepare you for further planning or study, if that is what you are interested in doing. Indeed, that is why this course uses many self-reflective activities where you can try to ground your studies within your own professional practice and experiences of working in agriculture or agricultural advisory and support services, or indeed a related setting or context. But equally, we have an end-of-course quiz to test your understanding of some key ideas and concepts around Living Labs.
Remember that what we expect you to have learned having studied this course is set out in the learning outcomes.
Learning outcomes
By completing this course, you will be able to:
explain how Living Labs can contribute to the provision of innovative agricultural advisory services
describe the AgriLink approach to Living Labs
apply and interpret design thinking and systems thinking methods and tools
assess and develop your facilitation practices, including running a blended course using the Living Lab Trainers’ Handbook
understand how to monitor and evaluate the operation and outcomes of a Living Lab
plan your own approach to establishing a Living Lab to provide an innovative agricultural advisory service.
Use your Activity Record on this course
Everything that you type into the free text boxes throughout this course can be downloaded or printed as an Activity Record at any point durning this course.
You access this Activity Record through the My Profile button (click on the blue button at the top of this page).
In this way, you can create a downloadable or printable version of your inputs throughout this course.
Reflective Activity 1 – What do you hope to learn?
Now that you have read the introduction and the learning outcomes we have set for this course, what are you hoping to gain from studying it? Write down your initial thoughts in the text box below.
Answer
The activity you have just engaged in is the first of several such activities. It is an example of a pattern of activities that constitute reflective learning. This style of learning is based on the notion that the understandings most useful to us, and that most readily become part of us, are learned by experience or by comparing what we are learning to our previous knowledge and experiences.
The activities are designed to enable you to discover your own learning by experience. That is a familiar idea, but it implies two activities: learning and experiencing. Both activities need to happen if we are to say that learning from experience has happened. Experiencing seems to have two components. The first is the quality of attention that allows me to notice the experience and its components. The second is memory. Calling experience to mind allows me to examine the experience and to think about it in ways that were not possible at the time. Learning is what I take away from that process that influences my behaviour or thinking in the future.
So, I cannot know what previous knowledge and experiences you are bringing to this course, but I assume they have a lot to do with innovation in agriculture and agricultural advisory services in some way. By making explicit your hopes based on your experiences, you should also be able to keep a record of what new things you are learning and whether they do address those original desires or not.
As the course does give pointers to much more information on certain topics, it gives you an opportunity to follow up on the things that most interest you in doing whatever you do around innovation in agriculture and agricultural advisory services.
One of the things that you may want to do after studying this course is to use it, or parts of it, to support some face-to-face teaching of others.
If so, there is an accompanying Trainers’ Handbook that gives suggestions of how you might do that.
In addition, there is an accompanying Living Lab Toolbox that provides details of how to use certain tools and techniques that are discussed in the course.
Now go to the next section.