Organic.Balkanet European Workshop

The Organic.Balkanet EU project organized a European Workshop titled "Training Challenges for the Agricultural Professionals: The Organic.Balkanet Experience", that took place in the eula of the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Bucharest  on November 17th, 2011. The Workshop was attended by more than 70 people, including researchers, academia, students of agronomic sciences, professionals in the field of organic agriculture as well as representatives of the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture.

The Workshop started with a keynote speech from Dr. Helga Willer from FiBL, providing a short overview of the status of Organic Agriculture in Europe and a presentation of the Organic Eprints archive and was followed by a presentation of previous similar to Organic.Balkanet initiatives (such as Bio@gro and Organic.Edunet), as well as the the presentation of the Organic.Balkanet project. A presentation of the e-learning methods was also delivered in the same session. The 2nd session was dedicated to presentations of the training events of the Organic.Balkanet project in the user countries (Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia).

A hands-on session included the use of the Organic.Balkanet MOLE portal, a course management platform for creating and delivering online courses as a part of a training curriculum. The 2nd part of the hands-on session included the VOA3R portal, which focuses on providing access to a siginificant number of open access scholarly content, as well as for interconnecting researchers of sciences related to agriculture, aquaculture and related areas. Both sessions were handled by Ass. Prof. Salvador Sanchez from University of Alcala and me, as a member of the GRNET team.

The last sessions of the workshop were dedicated to the Sustainability plan of the project and some additional presentations from Romanian organizations related to organic agriculture.

You can find more photos from the Workshop in the project's Flickr photostream.