Marinetraining.eu was initiated in 2013 with the aim of becoming the central point of access in order to find and retrieve information on European Marine Education and Training. The service was initiated by a team at the Marine Biology research group at Ghent university. A SWOT analysis of the first version of the portal helped to build in 2020 a second edition of the portal, which was launched in June this year. The focus shifted from Europe to worldwide and at the same time the look and feel of the website was updated in order to match the user needs and experience.
Not only the front end, where visitors browse the site, was improved, but also the backend used for data entry and maintenance, was streamlined. This reorganization of the backbone of the portal enables us to organize data entry in a more decentralized manner and to allow course organizers to submit the details of their course themselves.
With the support of the EMBRC-headquarters we managed shift from a mainly European focus to a real worldwide data coverage. So far we have managed to capture over 2700 degree programmes (bachelor, master, phd) and 350 short trainings (courses, workshops, webinars) from 80 countries. Future data entry efforts will focus on keeping the information up to date and covering some underrepresented regions (e.g. Africa). The increased data availability provides an additional tool to gather regional insights on specific training needs.
A new feature of MarineTraining.eu are the so-called thematic or regional sub-portals. Over the years multiple projects have made use of our services and contributed data to our portal. With this feature projects, organizations or regions can obtain a sub-section of the portal (with an own look and feel) in which they can manage their own set of trainings. All functionalities of the portal become automatically available for the projects. User and data management is completely in the hands of owners of the dedicated sub-portal. This feature was already implemented for the Caribbean Large Marine Ecosystem area and also for the Marine@UGent community.
A second new development in MarineTraining.eu is the launch of a E-Learning platform in which various types of E-learning courses can be hosted. The service, available through www.oceantraining.eu , which is based upon the Moodle technology offers training organizers the possibility to host online courses in the best possible conditions. Over the past 5 months in total 12 courses were already developed. Several new ones, ranging from mini-moocs to full accredited online courses will be launched and hosted in the coming 5 months.
Additional services are still under active development. We will for example launch a catalogue of learning resources (documents, videos,…) soon and we plan to allow training organizers to collect registrations for their courses through our system as well.
Are you interested to use or work together with MarineTraining.eu? Contact us at info@marinetraining.eu
