04-12-2012, 06:09 PM
WEB-BASED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT LEARNING PROGRAMS FOR FOOD INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS
WEB-BASED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT LEARNING.pdf (Size: 63.86 KB / Downloads: 39)
Food product development classes at Penn State (PSU), Saint Joseph's University (SJU),
Texas A & M, and Monterrey Tech were linked via compressed video (Picture Tel) and
the Web on most Wednesdays throughout fall semester 1999. (UC-Davis was not
included as originally planned because Dr. Haard was on sabbatical leave and his course
was not offered.) Course reference materials were managed though Course Info on the
SJU server. Topical speakers from the food industry made one-hour presentations from
either SJU or PSU. These were followed by questions from the students at each site to
the speaker. The net result was that the students benefited from exposure to a wide array
of professional speakers. This learning could not have been accomplished without these
interactive sessions.
In addition to the four university interactions, PSU and SJU had several interactive
sessions during which a decision case was discussed and concept maps of the food
product development process were constructed. Because the students from the two
universities had complimentary discipline orientations, the students learned a great deal
from one another though this interactive mechanism
From the four university collaborative effort, we learned that it is possible to have
resource speakers at one school delivering presentations to multiple sites. However, the
bridge that was used to "connect" the sites proved to be very unreliable. On several
occasions, one of the sites would be disconnected from the tele-lecture. This proved to
be very disconcerting to the students at those sites. It also had a negative impact on the
question and answer interchange at the end of the speaker's presentation. Degradation of
the quality of the sound also had a negative impact. It was apparent that students expect
commercial TV quality programs in classes using this approach. While the technologies
employed are only tools, they can negatively impact the quality of student learning
experiences when they malfunction.