Invited lecture given at the University of Piraeus, focusing on a large scale case study of a learning technologies' application. Focused on the example of the Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP, http://www.gfsp.org) and presented our view on backing it up with an infrastructure federating and linking different information sources/providers. These ideas have also been presented at this JALN paper: http://sloanconsortium.org/jaln/v17n2/open-and-scalable-learning-infrastructure-food-safety

1. How can we build an open and
scalable learning infrastructure
for food safety
Nikos Manouselis
nikosm@agroknow.gr

2. http://wiki.agroknow.gr
“meaningful services
around high-quality
agricultural data”

3. “…why do I
care??”

4. ?

5. ?

6. !

7. How can I provide
safe food?

8. How can I
produce safe
food?

10. ?

11. Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) being
established to raise at least $45,000,000 for
implementation of a Roadmap and 5-year
workplan
aim: train small food producers, around the
world, using blended approaches

12. global food safety capacity building

16. is it a…
?

17. reflecting on complexity
#3
Program Facilitation
Open & Scalable
Open & Scalable
Learning Infrastructure
Learning Infrastructure
Includes : :
Includes
- -OER data pool
OER data pool
- -Course registry
Course registry
- -Curriculum Development
Curriculum Development
-Curricula Alignment
-Curricula Alignment

18. evolving the concept
• may aim higher than a single GFSP learning
platform – cannot generalize something that
requires a focused, regional approach
• rather develop a GFSP Learning Infrastructure
including (among others)
– Educational Offerings Aggregator Services
– Curriculum Support, Registry & Alignment Services
– GFSP Learning Portal (main front end)
– GFSP Learning Widgets/apps (to be integrated in web
sites, offered through smartphones/tablets, etc)

19. could look like this

20. Educational Offerings Aggregator
• 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 GFSP ones

21. Curriculum Registry & Alignment
• representation of GFSP curriculum in
interoperable format (using learning outcomes,
competences)
– tools to allow other course providers to register and
express/map their curricula to the GFSP 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 curicullum
format

22. GFSP Learning Portal
• 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

23. GFSP Learning Widgets/Apps
• 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, …)

24. important distinction
• such a learning infrastructure is heavily
dependent on the back-end layers
• it is important to be able to power existing
applications and services
• the centralised portal mainly serves as
demonstrator
• will really change something if it provides a
wealth of resources around each topic

26. a case study
• regional meat producer in Paraguay
– example scenario: 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
– let us assume that they would like to find out
more about the food safety standards of cooked
ham

31. this is why
#3
Program Facilitation
Open & Scalable
Open & Scalable
Learning Infrastructure
Learning Infrastructure
Includes : :
Includes
- -OER data pool
OER data pool
- -Course registry
Course registry
- -Curriculum Development
Curriculum Development
-Curricula Alignment
-Curricula Alignment

32. what’s really happening behind

33. CONTENT PROVIDER
WITH UNORGANISED
COLLECTION
(e.g. Listed at Web
site or in DVD-ROM)
Chooses compliant tool
Metadata export in
Ingestion in
proprietary format & compliant tool
provides mapping
CONTENT PROVIDER
WITH CMS THAT DOES
NOT SUPPORT OAIPMH (e.g. Proprietary
DB)
CONTENT PROVIDER
WITH CMS THAT
SUPPORTS OAI-PMH
(e.g. FSKN compliant,
ePrints, DSPACE,...)
DOMAIN EXPERTS
publish & evolve
vocabularies &
ontologies

34. Exposes metadata
through OAI-PMH
Exposes metadata
through OAI-PMH
Indexed & available in
back-end
METADATA
AGGREGATOR
Exposes metadata
through OAI-PMH

36. typical problems
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
metadata authoring/creation
metadata assurance/validation
metadata values/vocabularies
metadata multilinguality
…lots more
36

37. a. authoring/creation
• metadata creation is a painful and
costly process
– automatic generation can help
– high quality/accuracy/relevance
descriptions require human intervention
37

38. a. authoring/creation
38

39. b. assurance/validation
• good online services demand high
quality (or at least not poor quality)
description of content
– someone needs to take the final decision
before something is published
– especially relevant when content
development has been costly/labourous
39

40. b. assurance/validation
40

41. c. values/vocabularies
• mappings and crosswalks among
values and vocabularies of different
collections are crucial
– usually manually defined and maintained
– difficult to ensure that all applications
will publish and link their vocabularies
– vocabulary bank management tend to
become too complex for the purpose
that they serve
41

42. c. values/vocabularies
42

43. d. multilinguality
• for multilingual contexts, everything
needs to become (and be maintained)
multilingual
– metadata values and labels
– interface labels for various systems
• automatic translation helps but usually
produces rather rough/poor
translations
43

44. d. multilinguality
44

45. challenges in semantics

46. describing course offerings
• what I am describing is different to what
you are describing…
– …but there are so many similar things!

47. Africa Lead course database
Provider: University of
Pretoria

48. CerOrganic portal

49. CerOrganic Schema
Africa Lead Schema
Missing

50. competencies description
• what I would like to learn is what you
need me to know…
– …but what is really needed is connecting a
job profile to the relevant course offerings!

51. GFSI Competency
Framework

52. AGRICOM
job profile description
Job description or
single task description
Required competences

53. GFSI Competency
Framework
AGRICOM Competence
Framework / Job task
Job / task title
Job profile /
task description
Competence Title
Competence description
Course title

54. expected learning outcomes
• what I am going to learn should be what I
am expected to know for my job…
– …but sometimes it’s not very clear what
this is going to be!

55. CerOrganic Curriculum description
DICLA training center
Capabilities: When completing this course you will
be able to perform basic routine operations in a
defined hydroponic context under close supervision.

56. more issues…
• old-fashioned legacy systems still used in such
traditional settings
– terms like “OER” and “MOOC” sound like science fiction
• novel technologies such as semantic stores and
ontology editing/managing environments are not
user-friendly and proven
– especially for such technology-ignorant users
• very rich semantics to be represented, handled and
exploited; but we are not there yet

57. wrap up

58. targeted domain
• rich in data-oriented problems and
cases
• focused on “real” users
• inter-disciplinary work
• results related to societal
goals/challenges

59. increase use & reuse
• digital sources and collections
material to be used (and
potentially re-used) in several
contexts
– even different than originally
expected/thought of

60. thank you!
info@agroknow.gr
http://wiki.agroknow.gr