User community engagement
Engagement with the user community through capacity building activities will be an important component of WorldCereal Phase II. It will serve the following purposes:
- Inform: Broadly communicate important developments and outcomes of the WorldCereal project
- Educate: Teach the community about remote sensing based agricultural monitoring, the concept, methods, requirements and limitations
- Train: In-depth, technical trainings on how to set-up and run the WorldCereal system will maximize the number of end users actually making use of the created system
- Collect user data and feedback: Aside from increasing knowledge, all these capacity building activities will also serve as a means to closely interact with potential end users, thereby acting as an additional tool to collect in-situ reference data and user feedback with regards to the WorldCereal system
To increase user uptake of the WorldCereal system we will organize dedicated capacity building activities in various formats.
WorldCereal training activities
To ensure all these objectives are met, WorldCereal will offer different types of training activities, including:
- Promotional material: informing the broad community about the objectives, progress and outcomes of the project.
- Webinars: The WorldCereal webinar series will consist of six online (live) events and represents a key tool for keeping the broad user community up-to-date with the progress and achievements of the project. Webinar topics will be in line with project outcomes.
- Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s): The goal of these courses is to provide a broad conceptual background to the topic of (global) cropland mapping and monitoring for any interested user. A typical MOOC is organized over the course of three weeks, with at least 3 hours of training activities per week. The advantage of this particular format lies in its accessibility, as learners can access and follow them anytime and from anywhere with internet connectivity. We aim for three different MOOCs (one per year) respectively to learn more about (1) field data collection, harmonization and model training; (2) the WorldCereal system and crop type mapping and (3) validation and downstream user applications (statistics, yield estimation, food security).
- Face-to-face trainings: At least three face-to-face trainings will be organized in collaboration with key stakeholders and likely adopters of the WorldCereal system. The thematic focus of the trainings will be on (1) field data collection and (2) use of the WorldCereal system. A typical face-to-face training will cover 2-4 days and will mostly focus on transferring the necessary practical skills to collect data, install and operate the processing system.
- Technical trainings: These dedicated trainings will be organized for specific and highly interested users and will cover all technical steps required to set up and run the WCS, either as cloud-based or stand-alone processing system. The trainings will be accompanied with hands-on notebooks and tutorials showcasing the different steps involved.
All training materials will be hosted on a dedicated page on our website and will be announced through our mailing list and social media.
