O2 – MERGO MOOC in wine tasting

TARGET

MERGO MOOC will have a broad audience. Partnership foresees three main categories:

1. Students in universalities in the faculty of Agriculture and enology; Food Engineering, Chemical.
2. Professionals in the wine production chain, namely:
   • winemaking companies;
   • professionals in the management of different viticulture phases for the high-quality wine production;
   • staff addressed at the maintenance of qualitative standards;
   • people who works in the defence of autochthone vineyards;
   • independent wine producers.
3. Training sommeliers and enthusiasts of wine tasting.

IMPACT

O2 will be highly tangible because will be delivered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed and offered through the Moodle platform at M21. In the next month (M22) will be the official international presentation (E6). For this reason it has intrinsically a transferability potential for a wide audience and the course will be drafted in order to have a potential for an easy integration into the courses in the Faculties of Agriculture all over the Europe, and a translation in new languages. However, a potential of O2 is the translation in more languages. MOOC will be in 6 languages: English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Croatian.
The expected impact is to innovate the MOOC sector by including procedural and autonomous learning using Internet of Things, Smart Objects and Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) for a concrete and multisensory approach. In addition, the expect impact of the MOOC in wine tasting subject is to give instruments for winegrowers, professionals, sommeliers, students in enology, based on transnational inputs and on a rigorous scientific approach. The value is the valorisation of different local excellences, producing a MOOC that grows from the triangle of knowledge, directly involving the business sector.

INNOVATION

Although few MOOCs on wine tasting are available, as described in the previous sections, this MOOC has the strong added value to include innovative elements (IoT and TUI), but it has an important value from itself. It is created by a strategic partnership that involve 4 HEIs, 1 company in wine sectors, 1 association of tasters, 1 SME in innovation in e-learning; this partnership cover 5 countries (Italy, France, Portugal, Croatia, Turkey) and 6 languages (including English). The MOOC will integrate both declarative learning with standard lessons, both procedural learning with a game-based approach and exercises drafted by experts and researchers, with home-kits for wine tasting available at home (O3) and fully integrated in a e-learning strategy based on a pedagogical model (O1) in wine sector.

AIMS

The MOOC will include theoretical lectures based on enology topics, i.e. vineyard and the grape quality, organic wines, wine defects, sensory evaluation of wine, wine tasting techniques, valorisation of autochthons vineyards, production chain, etc. The course will offer online materials, such as podcasts, videos and, whenever possible, webinars. Practical experiences during the course will be entirely based on the MERGO Odour Wine Game (O3).
The MERGO MOOC will incorporate collaborative construction functionalities (actually being a cMOOC) of a shared corpus opposed to the transmission of a corpus “state of the art” through classic xMOOC designs. Collaboration will be controllable in order to avoid chaotic or non-controllable learning. Drawing upon the theory of connectivism, the cMOOC will facilitate collaborative learning and communication when needed. Participants will also learn by making connections, through communicating and collaborating with others.
This way, basic educational goals can be set and reached and at the same time, the subject offered is provided in a flexible manner. The assessment of learners will be multi-faceted. For the design and development of the MOOC we will use formal standards such as ELOT:1429 and MOOQ’s Quality Reference Framework for MOOCs (based on ISO/IEC 40180).
All told, the aims of the O2 are:

1. To define a course syllabus on wine tasting, enology and viticulture with the collaboration of HEIs, wine producers and tasters.
2. To develop a set of MOOC learning contents in wine tasting with lessons in 6 languages with a rigorous scientific approach empowered by the experiences from the productive sector.
3. To deliver video contents made with professional shape and aimed at increasing the motivation in MOOC.
4. To integrate in operative way a new training and an additional assessment procedure based on tangible objects for an olfactive learning in wine tasting.