This document describes an open and scalable learning infrastructure for food safety capacity building called FSKN. FSKN aims to improve findability and discoverability of open educational resources related to food safety. It consists of several components: a food safety learning portal as the main interface, learning widgets/apps that can be embedded on other sites, and an educational offerings aggregator backend that ingests metadata from various sources. FSKN also includes a curriculum registry to align courses and allow browsing by learning outcomes. Usage scenarios show how FSKN could help a meat producer in Paraguay find information on food safety standards for cooked ham. Future work involves fully integrating demonstrators into the FSKN site and evolving the backend into a

1. EFITA Conference
Sustainable Agriculture through ICT
Innovation
23-27/06/2013
Turin, Italy

2. Towards an Open and Scalable
Learning Infrastructure for Food
Safety Capacity Building
Christine Geith, PhD and Karen Vignare, PhD
(Michigan State University, USA)
Charalampos Thanopoulos, PhD and Nikos Manouselis, PhD
(Agro-Know Technologies, Greece)

3. FSKN Model

4. • Plenty of institutions and projects that offer
access to good educational resources related to
food safety and food standards
− training opportunities
− open educational resources
− targeted/needed skills & competences
− certificated courses
Findability and discoverability of open
educational resources

5. Findability and discoverability of open
educational resources

6. Findability and discoverability of open
educational resources

7. Findability and discoverability of open
educational resources

8. Findability and discoverability of open
educational resources

9. Evolving the concept
inaccessible
Educational
Content
Unknown to the
potential target
groups
Lack of clear policies
No guidelines for openly
share learning
opportunities & content
Absent of thematic
networks for specific
agricultural topics
Learning portals
with agricultural
educational content
Data infrastructure
(..collect & provide
rich content..)
Technology
components
Metadata aggregation

10. v
Global food safety capacity
building
Strengthen the food industry
extend its technology
backbone
Access to free Safety
Knowledge
Re-use existing OER on food
safety topics

11. Open and scalable learning
infrastructure for food safety
c

12. • main front-end to present project and allow users
to find information in the aggregated sources
− various modalities (visual, device, thematic,
geographical, industry, …) for search & discovery of
courses and OER
− multilingual interfaces and metadata facilitated by
automatic translation engines
Food Safety Learning Portal

13. • search/discovery interfaces and mechanisms that
can be embedded in other web sites and portals
(widget-like or search pages in sites)
• mobile apps for various operational systems (iOS,
Android, Windows 8)
• back-end engine to allow straightforward
generation of adaptable versions of both
(thematic, industry, geographical, linguistic, …)
Food Safety Learning Widgets/Apps

14. • back end technology infrastructure
− ingest, harvest, aggregate course and OER metadata
from existing or new (e.g. legacy) learning platforms and
OER collections
− tools to allow course and OER providers to align/map
their metadata & classifications to the network’s
reference ones
Educational Offerings Aggregator

15. • representation of network’s curriculum in
interoperable format (using learning outcomes,
competences)
− tools to allow other course providers to register and
express/map their curricula to the network’s curriculum
− tools to facilitate the generation of multilingual versions
of the curricula descriptions
− generation of transformable curricula representations to
allow users to browse using preferred curriculum format
Curriculum Registry & Alignment

16. Food Safety Learning Infrastructure
- Usage Scenarios

18. • regional meat producer in Paraguay
– e.g. exploring how their company can start selling
packaged cooked ham to an international food
distribution company
• product of high quality one, made from pure pork
ham
– assume that they would like to find out more about
the food safety standards of cooked ham
Frigorífico Concepcion

19. Step 1: Search at Codex Alimentarius web page
powered
“Cooked ham
standard”
c

20. Step 2: Search at the FSKN web page powered
“Food labeling”
c

21. Step 2: Search at the FSKN web page powered
“Online course
for HACCP”
c

22. • digital sources and collections material to be used
(and potentially re-used) in several contexts
− even different than originally expected/thought of
• open and scalable learning infrastructure for food
safety resources (course, standards, ..)
• The next stage will be fully integrating the
demonstrators within the new FSKN site and then
− evolve the back end into a full scale federation of food
safety resources.
Conclusions & Future work

23. thank you!
geith@msu.edu
cthanopoulos@agroknow.gr
nikoms@ieee.org