CerOrganic ToT School - Day 1

The first day of the school is finally over. It was an exhausting day, as we rushed directly from Chania airport to the MAICh premises in order to attend the first sessions of the school. The lecture hall was crowded with more than 40 participants, being OA trainers, farmers and tutors of the school, among which many CerOrganic project partners.

The first sessions were presented by Dr. D. Smith and Ms. M. Moises (BM:UKK, Austria)

1. Designing a course with e-learning components
2. The importance of planning the e-learning course
3. Discussing the effectiveness of an e-learning course
4. Facilitate and evaluate the course

They were really interactive sessions, providing basic information on various aspects of an e-learning course.

After lunch, it was time for the Agro-Know team. Mr. Charalampos Thanopoulos provided detailed information on more practical issues of the training course, during the sessions:

1. Designing the training course
2. Implementation of participative techniques

Then I had the chance to further elaborate on blended learning methods in the training context, by presenting the sessions:

1. Introduction to the Organic Farmer Scenario concept
2. Elaboration of Organic Farmer Scenario description

during which the participants were introduced to the concept of training scenarios, they were presented with the predefined templates and they were asked to start describing their own training scenario. It seems that the training scenario concept was accepted by the majority of the participants, who started working on this description for the 30 mins that they had available. The flow of information in this sequence of sessions was smooth and continuous, so the sessions were building a solid basis for supporting the concept of training scenarios.

The first day of the school ended with a presentation about metadata and their application in the description of learning/training resources. A hands-on exercise that was intended to take place during this session was moved in tomorrow's program, during the MOLE platform hands-on exercise.

As for some technical issues, even though we faced a slight problem with the availability of power plugs for all these laptops and netbooks used during the course, we faced no problems with the internet connection. It was really weird to see that, as I was used in facing severe problems (or no connectivity at all) during such events....

Tomorrows program includes some more presentations by me, on "Using Open Educational Resources to support scenarios", "Finding digital resources: The Organic.Edunet Web portal", "Elaboration and adaptation of Organic Farmer scenario activities & resources" and "Preparation of Organic Farmer scenario presentation". This will be a 4-hours presentation marathon by me!

More info to come tomorrow.