Newswise — Making food safety education available through distance education is receiving Food Safety Consortium support at Kansas State University, where about 75 students are earning bachelor's degrees through this means. More than 100 students are using distance education to pursue undergraduate or graduate certificates or master's degrees in food safety.
"A great majority of these students are working in the food industry and are seeking food science knowledge and potential for career advancement through education," said Kelly Getty, a distance education assistant professor at the K-State Food Science Institute.
K-State has teamed with Purdue University and Indiana University to develop a national educational and outreach program for food safety and food defense, with K-State responsible for developing material into a distance education delivery format for graduate students and working professionals.
Last September, 41 participants from the three universities met for a workshop at which they viewed the developed curriculum modules and experienced a computer simulation of an intentional contamination to a food system. Those modules were the basis for developing this summer's K-State distance education course on Food Protection and Defense-Essential Concepts.
K-State's master of public health program includes a food safety emphasis area option. Online versions of the core public health courses will be completed in the spring semester of 2011, at which time the master of public health food safety emphasis area degree could be completed entirely online.
The educational program is also developing multilingual training for employees in the food industry. K-State's Beef Cattle Institute will convert the university's food safety research information into multilingual training materials for beef cattle industry workers. They will be web-based training modules covering food safety issues and best management practices for producers and farm workers.
K-State is also working on adding a food safety and security curriculum option to its existing bachelor of science degree program in food science, with a distance education component in addition to the on-campus curriculum.
"Many of our courses have already been developed as distance education. Some of them also are offered on campus each year," Getty said.
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