CerOrganic European Conference

The CerOrganic European Conference titled "Organic Agriculture & Education: Challenges in Training Advisors of organic farmers", took place on Tuesday, December 6th 2011 at the premises of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IGE – www.ige.gr). The Conference was organized under the auspices of the CerOrganic LdV EU project (www.cerorganic.eu) and aimed to provide an opportunity for meeting and discussion between scientists and experts from all over Europe, who are involved in the education and training in the field of organic agriculture.

The poster of the CerOrganic European Conference

The Conference included a number of presentations from project partners, who had the opportunity to present the outcomes of the work done during the project. In addition, presentations on related topics were delivered by external, invited speakers including:

• Costas Dritsas (Greek Representative of IFOAM EU Members), presenting the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)
• Prof. (KR) Christian Stracke from University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), presenting "The Needs for Quality Management, Competence Modelling and Certification in Vocational Education and Training"
• Prof. Stergios Tzortzios from the University of Thessaly (Greece) presenting his previous experience from related LdV projects "EcoJob-AP" and "Eco-Qualify III”
• Prof. Alex Koutsouris, from the Agricultural University of Athens (Greece) presenting "Co-learning facilitation: new roles for OA extension"
• Bas Timmers from the International Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture Training (The Netherlands) presenting "The advisor: the man in the middle"

The Conference consisted of four well-defined and focus sessions on 

1. "Competence-based curriculum in Organic Agriculture training", 
2. "Blended learning Approach in professional training for the Organic Agriculture", 
3. "Quality of vocational training on Organic Agriculture" and 
4. "ICT tools for the vocational training on Organic Agriculture".

I had the opportunity to present (during the last session) the Course Management Platform (MOLE) as it was used by the CerOrganic project during the various training events (both the CerOrganic Training of Trainers Summer School and the Validation Seminars that took place in each user country). The statistics of the usage of this platform were really encouraging after all!

More information about the Conference, including the agenda, poster and brochure can be found in the Conference's wiki page.

Training Course and Green Ideas 2011

During the last weeks my time is almost completely dedicated to two important tasks:

1. The testing phase of the VOA3R content population. Trying to coordinate a task which involves a significant number of project partners is not always easy, especially during August! I will not go into more details about this task.

2. The "Joint School on IT-Enhanced Organic & Sustainable Education for Teachers, Trainers and Agriculture Professionals", which will be a really big training course involving a number of respected tutors and a diverse audience, case study visits, lectures and hands-on exercises etc. Even though the organization of this course has been taken over by two colleagues of mine, still there are a lot of things to take care of, such as arranging flights and accommodation for the participants, estimating costs and involving budgets from different projects. Speaking of projects, the course will be primarily supported by Organic.Balkanet and CerOrganic, while VOA3R and I.S.L.E. will also be represented and contribute. This course will be collocated with another interesting event, Green Ideas 2011 which "will bring together people and institutions that are interested into agricultural, biodiversity and rural education, so that collaboration opportunities may be explored and exploited". This event will feature a really diverse list of participants, is sponsored by a number of relevant E.U. projects and supported by major organizations, such as FAO.

CerOrganic ToT School - The end

... at least for me, as I had to depart on Friday afternoon so I was not able to attend the social event on Friday evening nor the presentations by the trainees on Saturday. I trust that everything went fine during the last day of the training.

However, I faced some difficulties getting back home on Friday. My flight departing at 20.05 from Chania airport was cancelled due to severe weather (in fact the plane coming from Athens was unable to land in Chania airport due to the storm so it returned to Athens!). We were informed about that after we had checked in and waiting at the gate, where I had the chance to capture a view of the rain with my digital camera.

It was a good thing that a larger plane was arranged to come at the next flight (22.35) and pick all of us who decided not to cancel our tickets. However, this delay gave me the chance to prepare a draft report about the school and also prepare some emails to be sent later (there was no Wi-Fi connection at Chania airport). I then realized that during the training I had capture footage of about 25GB in low-res (640x480 due to the limitation of storage - it would have been more than 100GB if I shot @ 1280x720, 30 fps as I originally intended to...). I will try to make a good use of it (e.g. upload each presentation in the corresponding course in MOLE platform) but it I suppose that the editing will take much time and I cannot afford to spend too much on that task...

I got back in Athens at about 23.30 (there was a small delay in the flight) so I had to reschedule my plans (there was no suburban train nor metro at that time). Better late than never, as they say...

CerOrganic ToT School - Day 5

Day 5 of the CerOrganic training school is almost over. The majority of the participants are already in a case study visit in some greenhouse in Plakias village, Rethymno perfecture. I have a flight to catch and things to pack, so I had to stay behind, participating in a meeting with people from EU who are making sure that everything is ok with the CerOrganic project.

Today we had some interesting sessions: Case studies from the participating user countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Greece & Hungary). In addition, we had some really interesting training scenario presentations from the Czech team. I was really excited to see what the participants acquired and developed only in a few days! I really believe in the concept of training scenarios and I plan to work on them intensively during the next months.

As regards the training scenarios, they are going to be tested in the Organic.Balkanet EU project as well. In addition, I am going to revise the handbook for the training scenario implementation, based on feedback received during the CerOrganic ToT school. The presentations about the training scenarios have to be more interactive and provide more example of training scenarios. I just hope that I will have enough time to dedicate to this task.

CerOrganic ToT School - Day 2

Day 2 of the school is now over. It seemed really hard to cope up with all these personal presentations (09.00-13.30) in a row, but everything went well in the end. The following topics were presented:

1. Using Open Educational Resoures to Support Scenarios
2. The Organic.Edunet Web portal
3. Elaboration and adaptation of Organic Farmer Scenario (activities & resources)
4. Preparation of Organic Farmer Scenario Presentation

The participants seemed really interested about the training scenarios concept and the various sources of relevant information (such as the Organic.Edunet Web portal).

An additional presentation followed after lunch by Xenia Arapi from TUC/MUSIC, describing the various features of the MOLE portal.

The existence of interactive sessions greatly helped in this direction, as I had the opportunity to interrupt these presentations with hands-on exercises (such as the description of training scenarios and activities, searching for resources in portals etc). Even though my presentations included screenshots and animations, I think that some additional would greatly help in making them more enjoyable for the participants.

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.

Preparing for CerOrganic ToT School

I am trying to finish my preparations for the CerOrganic Training of Trainers Summer School. It will take place at MAICh premises, Chania, Greece during 23-28 of May, 2011.

I have quite a few presentations to make during the first two days (five or six, if I am not mistaken!) and I am rather nervous about that...they will be both about ICT tools and services in OA training (e.g. Metadata, Open Educational Resources & Organic.Edunet Web portal) as well as blended learning (training scenarios).

I have already revised my presentations a few times and my recent discussion with Erik Duval helped me in some cases. I have also prepared a handbook for the implementation of training scenarios in vocational education & training (VET), which will be revised according to the updates and feedback from the school.

This school will be a crash test for my knowledge, my skills and ... my temper! I really hope that everything will go well in the end.