Ask Extension

About Ask Extension

Ask Extension offers one-to-one expert answers from Cooperative Extension/University staff and volunteers within participating Land-Grant institutions from across the United States.

Ask Extension is now available. This system gives the public access to experts in their state and at a National Level. Groups and experts that use Ask Extension can brand it in any way they want for local use.

Ask A Question View the Knowledge Base

History

Began as Ask An Expert in 2006 and provided to all Land-grant Universities.
Serves as a key educational outreach tool in responding to individual educational needs.
Repository of 500K questions answered by 7.7K Extension experts.
Content receives 10 million page views annually driving the public to Extension expertise and resources

Get Started

To create a new Expert account, individuals must be invited by an existing Ask Extension expert to create one for them. If a new expert is unable to locate an existing expert, or they wish to start a new county or state-based group, email askhelp@extension.org.
A series of How-To videos are available on askhelp.extension.org covering various topics of working in Ask Extension.

Features

Responses via Email. After the initial question submission, both experts and clientele can provide answers and follow-up through a simple email reply.

Contact Info Now Available. Names and email addresses of clientele are available to experts. This allows experts to conduct individual follow-up with clientele.

Access Question History. Clientele can create login accounts through which they can retrieve an entire history of previously submitted questions .

Brand Widgets Your Way. Widgets come to the groups unbranded allowing each group to brand the widget any way they want.
New Ways to Assign Questions. Groups of Experts have control over their questions and who can access them.

What’s Next

We are building an AI Platform that provides information from a wide range of Extension educational resources that includes our existing database of over 500K questions in addition to image recognition capability for things like plants and insects.
A chatbot will be deployed to increase the impact of human experts by directing users to answers for common questions in existing resources. This reserves the expert’s time to answer new or difficult questions.
The chatbot can differentiate answers based upon location, season, and other conditions. It will integrate into other web platforms so it appears as part of each hosting organization’s webpage.
Resources are not stored by the Foundation. The chatbot links to external resources such as your state’s websites to ensure it is working with the latest versions and that ownership is protected.

Our mission is to help Cooperative Extension generate a more visible, measurable, local impact.

We achieve this through our nationally funded programs made possible by member dollars and cooperative agreements with federal agencies, and through partnering on state, regional, and national initiatives with Cooperative Extension and the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP). We serve all Land Grant Universities, regardless of membership status.

The Extension Foundation is a nonprofit established by Extension Directors and Administrators nationwide. Extension Foundation is embedded in the U.S. Cooperative Extension System and serves on Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP).

USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture

This website is supported in part by New Technologies for Ag Extension (funding opportunity no. USDA-NIFA-OP-010186), grant no. 2023-41595-41325 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Extension Foundation.

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