IARN — The U.S. Pork Center of Excellence continues to provide education and training opportunities for those in the pork industry.
Chelsey Van Genderen – program manager for USPCE – says the organization helps facilitate research and learning through national collaboration. She outlines the Swine Science Online Program.
“And that is a university level undergraduate program where there are 16 one credit courses taught by the leading instructors in their subject matter,” said Van Genderen. “The cool thing about this program is that students can take a course with the best of the best no matter what university they are at and either transfer those credits back to their home institution, or we have a lot of adult learners or those nontraditional students that are taking this as a learning opportunity for continuing education as well.”
Van Genderen notes a recently launched program is exposing high school students to pork industry jobs and career opportunities to interest them down the road.
“Destination Pork is a recently launched high school education curriculum that the U.S. Pork Center of Excellence developed,” said Van Genderen. “It was launched last fall. There’s kind of two pathways that are involved in the curriculum, which is targeted for high school ag classrooms so the first one is an instructor led seven lesson unit, and it can be in classroom, or it has the capability of being added into a Google Classroom, and all of the materials and everything are available for free for the instructor for their download and use. And then the other pathway that’s included in Destination Pork is an online module that has four learning components to expose high school students to careers in the pork industry.”
The U.S. Pork Center of Excellence is a joint effort of the National Pork Board, the National Pork Producers Council, state pork associations and land grant universities.
Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network
