According to the Food Standards Agency of Africa, “four out of five people globally put themselves at risk of food-related illnesses due to poor hygiene habits in the kitchen.” This stands true globally too. Undercooking, lack of cleanliness, and even negligence in washing the raw produce can lead to bacterial/fungal infections and those have even turned out to epidemics in some cases. Food safety practices are crucial at homes and equally so in the hospitality industry, food manufacturing, and packaging industry too. Handling, serving, and selling food definitely requires close attention towards safety and hygiene. In a previous post, we discussed why eLearning is a good choice for food safety training. In this post, we will look at the strategies to focus on while using eLearning in Food safety training.
Create a Learning Timeline
Food safety training is time-critical. Even though eLearning today focuses on providing a more self-paced, convenient, and exploratory learning environment, with subject matters that are time-sensitive as in the case of food safety, eLearning should be created with a specific time frame for completion. Not just that, including assessments, conducting routine evaluations becomes important too. Sequential learning modules with a specified time limit for completion, reinforcing the learning, etc. should be the focus while creating eLearning for food safety training.
Chunking it Down
Food safety regulations usually run long, pages after pages of do’s and don’ts that often tend to infuriate the impatient kind of learners and bore the rest. This is where chunking the content and adding some interactions becomes important. When creating eLearning the content should be spilled into courses, interconnected or independent with meaningful interactions. The use of multimedia audio and visuals, immersive graphics, etc. too can make eLearning work really well for ensuring food safety.
Make Accessibility a Priority
Food safety training can basically be for anyone from waiters, stall owners, food delivery drivers, kitchen assistants, and people whose job involves handling food. The key here is that all these jobs lack time and space stability in comparison to other corporate processes. The locations, the free time, and devices of choice would all differ, which is why eLearning that can be accessed on desktops, tablets, or any internet-connected device or even offline should be considered as a channel for learning delivery.
Utilize the Power of Scenarios
Food safety training often concerns adapting to real-time situations and hence the whole idea often revolves around making the learners well acquainted with the product, working equipment, environment, etc. eLearning hence, should leverage all this. Scenarios that match real-time situations, characters that match the roles of actual store/unit members, and scene designs that match actual buildings or kitchen designs, etc. can be quite helpful when it comes to creating a food safety training course.
Food safety and hygiene training topics are related to the importance of food safety procedures, risk assessment, food handling, reporting food hazards, and much more. Most of it can however be monotonous and too instructional, eLearning with interactions, innovation, and creativity can add life to such content. The trick, however, lies in strong design and relevant content placement.
Using eLearning to deliver food safety training is not just a choice, but the need of the hour keeping into consideration the changing demographic and the impact of industry 4.0. Digitalization is no longer a choice, but a requirement. But, don’t worry, it is easier than you think. The Knowzies team is adept at handling new transitions. So, get in touch at the earliest.
