Identification of Core Competencies for an Undergraduate Food Safety Curriculum Using a Modified Delphi Approach

Identification of core competencies for undergraduates in food safety is critical to assure courses and curricula are appropriate in maintaining a well‐qualified food safety workforce. The purpose of this study was to identify and refine core competencies relevant to postsecondary food safety education using a modified Delphi method. Twenty‐nine experts representing food safety professionals in academia, government, and industry were given 2 rounds of questionnaires that specified initial food safety competencies, core domains, and subdomains. Competencies were defined as a set of skills, knowledge, and abilities that correlate to success of a trainee. The framework for which competencies were classified consisted of (1) core domains, defined as broad food safety subjects; and (2) subdomains, or more specific food safety subjects. The expert panel used a 5‐point Likert scale with an acceptance criterion, or consensus, of 75%, with a rating of “4” or greater. After 2 rounds of questionnaires and revisions from the expert panel, 5 core domains were established: (1) Food Production, Manufacturing, Retail, and Consumer; (2) Foodborne Hazards; (3) Public Health; (4) Legislation and Policy; and (5) Communication and Education. Specific responses from the experts highlighted areas in which further curriculum revision would be beneficial. This study provides a framework for the development of a vetted, standardized undergraduate food safety curriculum. The Delphi method, with its inclusion of professionals representing various sectors of food safety, provided relevant perspectives for curriculum design, and also allowed participants the opportunity to contribute to the education of future food safety professionals.     

Interpreting young people's self-expression through characters and relationships in collaborative creative writing

White Water Writers is an intervention that offers school pupils the opportunity to collaboratively write a novel in a week. The current study uses thematic analysis to interpret the voices of young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities through the characters and relationships created in this fictional writing. The main themes derived from the data were: heroism and villainy, associated with characteristics such as responsibility and control; fictional powers, linking to personal agency; social relations, including positive relationships with peers and authority figures; and anthropomorphism, for exploring new emotions and interactions between humans and animals. This suggests that creative writing may be a useful lens through which to explore young people's views of their lived experiences.     

The role of design ethics in maintaining students' privacy: A call to action to learning designers in higher education

Maintaining students' privacy in higher education, an integral aspect of learning design and technology integration, is not only a matter of policy and law but also a matter of design ethics. Similar to faculty educators, learning designers in higher education play a vital role in maintaining students' privacy by designing learning experiences that rely on online technology integration. Like other professional designers, they need to care for the humans they design for by not producing designs that infringe on their privacy, thus, not causing harm. Recognizing that widely used instructional design models are silent on the topic and do not address ethical considerations such as privacy, we focus this paper on how design ethics can be leveraged by learning designers in higher education in a practical manner, illustrated through authentic examples. We highlight where the ethical responsibility of learning designers comes into the foreground when maintaining students' privacy and well-being, especially in online settings. We outline an existing ethical decision-making framework and show how learning designers can use it as a call to action to protect the students they design for, strengthening their ethical design capacity.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• Existing codes of ethical standards from well-known learning design organizations call upon learning designers to protect students' privacy without clear guidance on how to do so.
• Design ethics within learning design is often discussed in abstract ways with principles that are difficult to apply.
• Most, if not all, design models that learning design professionals have learned are either silent on design ethics and/or do not consider ethics as a valid dimension, thus, making design ethics mostly excluded from learning design graduate programs.
• Practical means for engaging in ethical design practice are scarce in the field.

What this paper adds

• A call for learning designers in higher education to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, strengthening their ethical design capacity.
• A demonstration of how to use a practical ethical decision-making framework as a designerly tool in designing for learning to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being.
• Authentic examples—in the form of vignettes—of ethical dilemmas/issues that learning designers in higher education could face, focused on students' privacy.
• Methods—using a practical ethical decision-making framework—for learning design professionals in higher education, grounded in the philosophy of designers as the guarantors of designs, to be employed to detect situations where students' privacy and best interests are at risk.
• A demonstration of how learning designers could make stellar design decisions in service to the students they design for and not to the priorities of other design stakeholders.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Higher education programs/institutions that prepare/employ learning designers ought to treat the topics of the designer's responsibility and design ethics more explicitly and practically as one of the means to maintain and protect students' privacy, in addition to law and policies.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to hold a powerful position in their professional practice to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, as an important aspect of their ethical design responsibilities.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to adopt a design thinking mindset in order to protect students' privacy by (1) challenging ideas and assumptions regarding technology integration in general and (2) detecting what is known in User Experience (UX) design as “dark patterns” in online course design.