Sunnie Kim's blog

Some interesting things going on around campus:

Lifelong Learning at MSU
Lifelong education enrollment status allows students to pursue an education at any time, in any place... [read article in the State News]

Online Professional Master of Science in Food Safety in MSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine
A Virtual Success ProMS: CVM’s first online graduate degree program prospers... [read article on page 23 of CVM's Perspective magazine]

U.S. and International Food Law Distance Education Courses and Certificate Program
The Institute for Food Laws and Regulations (IFLR) at Michigan State University sponsors education on international food laws and regulation... [learn more]

News about the AgShare project is officially out! It is on the homepage of MSU News and covered in external local and national news including the Lansing State Journal, Seattle Times, and USA Today.

This year our holiday party was graciously hosted by Mary Anne at her beautiful home. We enjoyed a great time of food and games (Christmas carol sing-off and charades)! It's always a blast hanging out with the MSUglobal gang!

All of us here at MSUglobal wish you a wonderful holiday season. It has been a fantastic year and we look forward to an even better one!

Open educational resources (OER) was the topic at vuDAT's November Breakfast Series. Cliff Lampe and Rick Wash from the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media presented really interesting information on openness, user-generated content, and motivation for contribution.

I gave a brief overview of the benefits of OER and some examples from MSU and elsewhere. Here are my slides with links to examples:

Yesterday MSUglobal had its annual staff retreat that began with a DISC workshop in the morning and a mobile scavenger hunt and BBQ in the afternoon. At the DISC workshop we learned more about our styles and personalities and how to work with and communicate with each other more effectively. It was informative and lively and fun to see the different personality types.

For the mobile scavenger hunt, teams drove all around the East Lansing, Okemos, and Holt area looking for the objects on their list including a cocktail umbrella, pizza coupon, and car dealership flag, as well as taking pictures of an 85 year old person, a city official in front of a municipal building, a team member helping a stranger carry groceries to his/her car, and more! It was a crazy adventure that ended in a delicious potluck BBQ and a couple rounds of Bingo.

We had a wonderful time celebrating our year's successes and looking forward to an even better one. Go team!

Made with Slideshow Embed Tool

With the increasing demand for safe food and the growing globalization of food production and manufacturing, there is a great need for no-cost, accessible training and educational resources for food safety professionals, especially those working in developing countries where such access is not readily available.

Michigan State University and the Global Food Safety Initiative have partnered together to create the Food Safety Knowledge Network (FSKN), a directory of open educational resources in the area of food safety, which will make quality content easily and efficiently findable.

FSKN will use ccLearn’s DiscoverEd search tool to draw resources from reliable sources. These materials will be curated by experts in the field as well as aligned to a set of core competencies for food safety managers so that the users can identify the specific area the resource covers as well as trust the quality of the content. This fall, the Food Safety Knowledge Network will be pilot tested to support implementation of supplier training at the pre-certification level in developing countries including India and China.

If you have or know of food safety resources to share, please contact Sunnie Kim at kiml@msu.edu.

All resources that the FSKN integrates into DiscoverEd will have a Creative Commons license, with all FSKN site content available via CC BY.

This past July, WorldTAP hosted their annual International Short Course on Food Safety. At this week-long event, food safety professionals from 17 different countries congregated in East Lansing, MI to learn from MSU experts on various food safety topics.

MSUglobal partnered with WorldTAP to experiment with different technologies and social media tools to 1) increase enrollment in the short-course by building awareness and showcasing short-course features over the next year (results in Year Two) and 2) increase research opportunities by leveraging existing networks and displaying of participant projects and affiliations (results in 18-24 months).

View the outputs of this experiment.

Creative Commons' ccLearn created a fun video summarizing the Open Education 2009 experience which took place earlier this month in Vancouver B.C.

Check out our MSU folks in this video:

• Chris Geith | MSUglobal
• Brendan Guenther | vuDAT
• Rand Spiro | College of Education
• Sunnie Kim (me!) | MSUglobal

Last week, several of us from MSU attended the Open Education Conference in beautiful Vancouver B.C. The conference was hosted by the University of British Columbia who did a wonderful job setting up the event. OpenEd is one of my favorite events because it brings people together from various places, industries, and schools of thought to exchange ideas and innovations. The people at these events are inquisitive, outside-the-box thinkers, rebellious, and so laid back and friendly.

My presentation, "Piggy-backing Your Way to OER Growth in Higher Education," described how MSUglobal has been growing OER awareness, use, and creation at MSU by helping faculty and departments add an OER piece to their existing programs, projects, and proposals. You can view the recorded presenation below (begins around minute 19). You can also view the presentation slides.