Extension is a continuous educational process. Primarily, in an effective extension education programme, the following five stages are included (Leagans 1971):
1. Study of situation and problem–At this stage Extension Personnel should collect all information about farmers, i.e., farmers education, interest, requirement, way of thinking, viewpoint and social status. Information related to physical condition, i.e., type of soil, types of land, market, cropping method, size of land, family status, community service, communication facilities etc. should be collected and study of local, social, national and international problems should also be undertaken. Extension Personnel should analyse these factors on the basis of “What they are” and “What they ought to be”. Only after analysing all these problems the solution should be considered.
2. Objectives and solution–At this stage, objectives of Extension Education should be according to above-mentioned requirements. In drafting the objectives the Extension Personnel should keep in mind the following points:
(i) Objectives should be limited and extremely important.
(ii) Participation of rural people should be compulsorily included.
(iii) Objectives should be able to bring about desired change in human behaviour.
3. Teaching plan of work–There are two main points in this third stage: (i) What should be? and (ii) How it should be? In this stage, extension methods should be selected and all the conditions necessary for learning process should be created so that the people can easily learn it to solve their problem and bring about change in their behaviour. How the Extension Personnel selects the extension methods will reflect his true capabilities and worth.
4. Evaluation–At this stage, all the work done until now is evaluated and it is seen that whether the objectives were properly chosen and how they are executed. From this we can figure out whether we are going in right direction or not. The success and failure of extension educational programme depends on this stage of evaluation. The facts should be analysed without any bias during evaluation.
5. Reconsideration–If our evaluation results indicate that our aim and objectives are not fulfilled and that we have to do the work again than we should repeat educational process from first step to the last step.
In this way, the extension educational process continuously goes on till the all-round development of people is achieved.
very useful