During the last three years the program was developed by the project staff and twelve ANAU lecturers in collaboration with Austrian professors, stakeholders and students within the Project Building Organic Agriculture in Armenia | BOAA. However, no educational program can succeed without interest of students. Therefore, the BOOA team members, PhD student and APPEAR scholar Hasmik Hovakimyan, and ANAU lecturer Sasun Mamajanyan, conducted a survey among ANAU students (mainly Bachelor students) in October, 2019 in order to identify students’ awareness and interest regarding the Organic Agriculture Master program, their willingness to start a Master program, their desired learning methods, amongst others.
The answers by the students helped the project team to customize the program and promotional activities to student needs. In total 124 students from all the regions of Armenia and Republic of Artsakh completed the survey. According to the results, the Armenian labour market demands the Organic Agriculture program and students value the strong connection between industry and University within this program (52%). High qualified lecturers (scoring 5 from 5), new teaching methods (scoring 4,4 from 5) and international cooperation (scoring 4,3 from 5) were identified as the most important factors for students to decide for a master program. BOAA already considered all These factors which are implemented in the new Organic Agriculture Master Program. The survey results make the project team confident that the Organic Agriculture Master Program will be a success. All of the survey participants (100%) would like to continue their education with a Master’s program and more than half of the participants would like to be notified about the program’s newsletter (52%).