Soil, Plant and Environment Relationships [antikvár]

Preface Preface From the 1993/94 academic year a new and restructured curriculum has been introduced at the Faculty of Agriculture of Debrecen Agricultural University. It aims at the improvement of the quality of education and endeavours to establish more conducive conditions for students to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for profitable and environmentally conscious agricultural production. It also creates the curricular background for issuing internationally recognised degrees and diplomas. The underlying principle by which the new curriculum tries to achieve these aims is flexibility. The previous rigid curriculum has been replaced with a far more flexible one which offers students a vast choice of optional subjects and considerable freedom in planning their own individual course of study throughout the academic years. The new curricular structure, however, is only a framework for the improvement of educational quality and it has to be filled with adequate content and teaching methods. With the financial assistance of Tempus several joint European projects have been implemented throughout the Faculty for the adoption of improved teaching methods. As for the content of education, the basis is already given from the previous curriculum. Nevertheless, it must be kept up-to-date continuously by incorporating the latest scientific results. In the past two years Tempus and other Phare projects gave us opportunity to get to know the new scientific results of the "Plant-Environment" research in the United Kingdom (Plant Environment Laboratory of the University of Reading; Institute of Arable Crops Research in Rothamsted). Relying on the experiences we started to make improvements on our own field experiment database, to prepare lecture notes for distribution and to work out computer models.