Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Development of innovative ICT-based content and services for learning objects in Organic Agriculture through the CerOrganic Web Portal

The CerOrganic Web Portal has been designed and it is under development an innovative online database for the supporting ICT-based training material, services pedagogies and practice for lifelong learning. It is the outcome of the Leonardo da Vinci project CerOrganic for the identification of the training needs and qualifications of agricultural experts in order to be able to serve as farmer advisors on modern and accurate Organic Agriculture methods and practices, focusing on a pilot group of candidate advisors from four pilot testing countries around Europe (i.e. Belgium, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece and Hungary); This paper demonstrates the facilities of an online database for mapping the providing training opportunities (like courses, modules and units) with the required competences for targeted stakeholders in filed of Organic Agriculture.

Contributed by Charalampos Thanopoulos, Axel Maroudas, Yiannis Tsilivigkos, Kostas Kastrantas,
John Stoitsis

2 comments:

  1. Even though the CerOrganic project is aimed at the training of OA trainers (in order to train the end-users=farmers), this paper provides a different perspective.

    What I found really important is the correlation between portal users, competences and training opportunities. When this ambitious plan will come into implementation, the user will be able to select specific trainings for his specific needs, focused on what he really requires from a training. So far, similar trainings have been general, covering a wide variety of topics and they were covering the general needs of a wide variety of trainees.

    The infrastructure described in the paper may be too advanced for me to get into more details, but me being involved in a number of EU projects that deal with the training in the OA field, I am really looking forward to see this portal in action.

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  2. I also think this looks like a very interesting portal. However, while the competence objects in the introduction are depicted as the building block, and they are described in section 2, they are not even mentioned in section 3 and the rest of the paper. What happened to the building blocks? In section 2, a lot of the text is exactly replicated, and it would benefit by being edited. In fig. 1, "User" is used for what in the text is explained as one of three types of users, that is visitors. Later (in section 5) "Viewer" is used for the same type of user. Be careful to use the same terms throughout. I find "User's actions" in section 5 much too specific for this type of paper. It could be shown in a table, or explained superficially with fewer words. The lettering in fig. 2, 3 and 4 is much too small to read.
    Ilse

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