Multidisciplinary Aspects of Learning Information Technology in Accredited Agricultural Education Programs

Abstract

During the transformation of the Hungarian Higher Education System new educational programs were developed on different levels in the agricultural higher education. The levels of the programs are Postsecondary, BSc, MSc and PhD programs. Most curricula required learning information technology on different content and level. These educational programs are accredited and the curricula are very similar in every university. The contents of the computing subject are almost the same on the BSc level. There are 15 BSc, 15 MSc programs in the Hungarian Higher Education System in 2009. The content of the informatics subject are the most important subtopics such as spread sheet and database handling, networking, etc. The professional subjects contain some informatics knowledge, but it depends on the educational program, subjects and professors. In the MSc programs the informatics topics differ by name and content according to the target of the training program. On this level more professional subjects can be found which contain applied informatics knowledge. But we think this is not enough in our education systems so we accredited the agricultural engineer in agricultural informatics and government BSc program. This program started 3 years ago and 5 Hungarian Universities offer this training program in 2009. The subject group of basic informatics has 36 credits and applied agricultural informatics subjects need 29 credits. It means that the rate of informatics and specialized informatics knowledge is more than 30% in the curriculum. The newest effort is that we have developed the Master of Business Informatics program with a “Informatics for Rural Development” specialization. The next development is a one year vocational training program in agricultural informatics. In the paper we discuss the demand of informatics knowledge on different educational levels and in programs based on the accredited training and outcome requirements as well as our training experiences.