Assessment of a food microbiology senior undergraduate course as a potential food safety distance education course for poultry science majors

Distance education courses have become popular due to the increased number of commuter students as well as people already in the workforce who need further education for advancement within their careers. A graduate-level Web-based course entitled Special Topics--Poultry Food Safety Microbiology was developed from an existing senior undergraduate advanced food microbiology course in the Poultry Science Department at Texas A&M University. Conversion of standard lecture material into a distance education course can provide unique challenges to maintain comparable course content in an asynchronous manner. The overall objective for this course was to examine bacterial activities including ecology in food, animals, raw and processed meat, eggs, and human pathogenesis. Students were surveyed at the end of the class and the majority agreed that they would be willing to take the course as an online course, although they were not willing to pay an extra fee for an online course. The majority of students used the online version of the course as a supplement to the classroom rather than as a substitute.