The course itself was developed within the BENEFIT Erasmus+ project, a consortium of European and Palestinian universities that ran from 2019 to 2023 to build capacity in precision agriculture. The MOOC combined two thematic modules, an introduction to precision agriculture and a module on remote sensing and data processing, each following a uniform weekly structure: a five-minute introductory video presenting objectives, a curated set of video lectures, PDFs, web links and open-access research papers, discussion forums and a formative quiz. The course was uploaded to the Al-Istiqlāl University Moodle platform in October 2023 and opened for enrolment in December 2023.

What makes this course methodologically interesting is its instructional architecture, which integrates three complementary frameworks. The six-step ASSURE model provided the overall development scaffold, guiding designers to analyse learners, state objectives, select methods and media, utilise those materials, require learner participation and evaluate and revise. The TPACK framework, which maps the integration of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge, guided how technology, teaching craft and subject matter were woven together. Finally, the Kirkpatrick model was applied within the final ASSURE phase to assess learner reactions, the first of its four evaluation levels. The evaluation reported here is confined to that reaction level and to self-reported confidence; it does not include objective knowledge testing, which would correspond to Kirkpatrick Level 2.

To measure learner perceptions, the team adapted the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey, an instrument that operationalises the four components of Keller’s ARCS motivational model: Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction. A panel of five subject-matter experts, three precision-agriculture specialists and two educational technologists, reviewed each candidate item for relevance, clarity and cultural appropriateness for a Palestinian higher-education audience, rating relevance on a four-point scale and computing item-level content-validity indices. Items scoring below 0.80 were revised or excluded. The resulting course-evaluation section comprised eight satisfaction items and nine confidence items, rated on a five-point Likert scale anchored at Strongly Disagree (0) and Strongly Agree (4). Five negatively worded items were reverse-scored before composite calculation, so that higher scores uniformly indicate more positive outcomes. The instrument was piloted with eight learners who had completed Module 1, who were then excluded from the main survey, and completion took roughly eight minutes.

The headline statistical results are unambiguous. Learners reported positive overall satisfaction, with a composite mean of 2.74 on the 0-to-4 scale (standard deviation 0.57), and positive overall confidence, with a composite mean of 2.54 (standard deviation 0.40). Both composites sat significantly above the scale midpoint of 2.0, corresponding to Neutral, with p-values below 0.001 and standardised effect sizes exceeding 1.2, large effects by conventional benchmarks. Agreement was strongest for perceived MOOC design quality, where 82.3 percent agreed or strongly agreed that it was a pleasure to work on such a well-designed course, followed by course enjoyment, confidence in mastering the content, and confidence in passing an examination, each at 75.8 percent agreement. The single negatively worded satisfaction item, on whether repetition caused boredom, was rejected by 51.6 percent of respondents, indicating that repetition was not perceived as a source of disengagement.

Within the confidence items, the researchers distinguished, on theoretical grounds rather than through factor analysis, a five-item Positive Confidence subscale and a four-item Perceived Difficulty or Barrier subscale. The Positive Confidence subscale yielded a mean of 2.67 (Cronbach’s alpha 0.814), while the reverse-scored Difficulty subscale yielded 2.38 (alpha 0.769). Three of the four difficulty items were rejected by majorities: 58.1 percent disagreed that the exercises were too difficult, 59.7 percent disagreed that they could not understand quite a bit of the material, and 53.2 percent disagreed that the course was more difficult than they would like. The exception was the item on slide information density, asking whether many slides carried so much information that it was hard to remember key points. This item did not differ significantly from the neutral midpoint (p = 0.742), with 51.6 percent of respondents neutral and 24.2 percent agreeing. The authors are careful to frame this as an area that may warrant further, exploratory review rather than a confirmed design weakness, given the non-significant result and the modal neutral response.

Perhaps the most striking finding is the strong positive correlation between satisfaction and confidence: Pearson’s r = 0.746, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 0.610 to 0.839, and p < 0.001. A non-parametric Spearman sensitivity check yielded a consistent result (ρ = 0.757). Learners who reported higher satisfaction with the MOOC also reported higher confidence in their learning. However, because both constructs were measured concurrently by self-report within the same instrument and at the same measurement occasion, this association cannot establish the direction of the relationship, whether one construct influences the other, or whether part of the association reflects shared measurement context rather than a substantive link between the two constructs.

A paired-samples t-test confirmed that satisfaction was significantly higher than confidence, with a mean difference of 0.20 points, p < 0.001, and a standardised paired effect size of dz = 0.53, a medium effect. The researchers interpret this satisfaction-confidence gap as theoretically consistent with the inherent technicality of precision agriculture, a field spanning remote sensing, drone operation, variable-rate technology and precision irrigation, each involving non-trivial learning curves. A confidence composite above the midpoint but below satisfaction should be read not as instructional failure but as a pattern consistent with appropriate calibration: learners were engaged and satisfied while the confidence data suggest that mastery of complex content may require sustained effort beyond a single online course.

The demographic profile of respondents adds interpretive texture. Female learners constituted the majority of the sample at 58.1 percent, a noteworthy distribution given the historically male-dominated character of agricultural science and precision-agriculture technology fields. The largest educational group held bachelor’s degrees (53.2 percent), followed by master’s (19.4 percent), doctoral (14.5 percent) and intermediate diploma qualifications (12.9 percent). The age distribution skewed young, with 64.5 percent under 25 years of age, and 67.7 percent were full-time students while 24.2 percent were full-time employees. Perhaps most tellingly, 66.1 percent of respondents had no prior MOOC experience, suggesting that the BENEFIT course served as a point of first contact with open online learning for the majority of participants. The most frequently cited enrolment motivations were improving general knowledge (40.3 percent) and professional development (30.6 percent).

The authors acknowledge several limitations that temper the strength of their conclusions. The cross-sectional, self-report design, with no control group, no pre-test and no objective performance measure, precludes causal inference and limits claims to perceptual outcomes at Kirkpatrick’s reaction level. The sample of 62 is geographically and institutionally homogeneous, drawn from a single programme, and while the response rate was high, no data were available to compare respondents with the seven non-respondents, so non-response bias cannot be excluded. No a priori power calculation was performed; sensitivity analysis indicates the sample was sufficient to detect only medium or larger effects. The two-part confidence structure was specified conceptually rather than confirmed by factor analysis, and the reliability of the complete eight-item satisfaction composite, including the reverse-scored boredom item, remains to be established. Because satisfaction and confidence were both collected by self-report within the same questionnaire, common-method variance may inflate the observed correlation to an extent that cannot be separately quantified with the present data.

Subject of Research: Learner satisfaction and confidence in a precision agriculture MOOC for Palestinian higher education

Article Title: Evaluating learner satisfaction and confidence in a precision agriculture MOOC: a cross-sectional study in Palestinian higher education

Article References: Khalilia, W., Horoub, H., Iwidat, H., Abdelhafid, F., Židek, R., Belej, Ľ., & Palková, Z. (2026). Evaluating learner satisfaction and confidence in a precision agriculture MOOC: a cross-sectional study in Palestinian higher education. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1954745. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1954745

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1954745

Keywords: MOOC, precision agriculture, Palestinian higher education, learner satisfaction, learner confidence, instructional design, ASSURE model, TPACK, Kirkpatrick model, Erasmus+, BENEFIT project, Frontiers in Education

The Students As Planetary Defenders project launched in September 2023 with a deceptively simple premise: students should not merely read about astronomy but should practice it. Over three years, the initiative engaged more than 2,000 students and nearly 500 teachers across Europe and beyond in STEM activities centered on comets, asteroids, micrometeorites and planetary defence. Rather than relying on simplified textbook exercises, the project connected participating primary and secondary schools directly to professional research infrastructure, including robotic telescope networks, meteor camera arrays and international asteroid search collaborations. The result was a generation of school students who planned observations, retrieved raw data, performed calculations and contributed to genuine scientific workflows, all while their activities were woven into school curricula and astronomy clubs through a student-centred, project-based approach.

The technical scope of what these students accomplished is remarkable for any age group, let alone for secondary school. Working with robotic telescopes from the Las Cumbres Global Observatory network, students learned to plan astronomical observations, retrieve and analyse the resulting data, and produce their own astronomical images from professional-grade instruments. This is not a simulation; the Las Cumbres network operates research-class telescopes distributed across the globe, and the same pipelines used by professional astronomers to monitor transient events were placed at the students’ disposal. Learning to schedule an observation, account for telescope availability and instrument constraints, and then process the returned frames into scientifically meaningful images gave participants a complete end-to-end experience of observational astronomy.

Meteor research formed another pillar of the project. Using the PRISMA/INAF meteor cameras and their data, students calculated meteor trajectories and mapped meteor paths with the PASCAL software, the PRISMA All-Sky Camera Analysis Laboratory, to identify possible landing areas for the recovery of meteorites. The technique relies on triangulation: when a bright meteor is recorded simultaneously by multiple all-sky cameras at known locations, the geometry of the observed paths allows researchers to reconstruct the object’s atmospheric trajectory and, crucially, to narrow down where any surviving fragments might have landed. Students mastered this workflow themselves, transforming raw camera records into candidate fall zones. It is the same methodology that professional networks use to recover freshly fallen meteorites, and it demands genuine competence in geometry, data analysis and error estimation.

The project’s asteroid search component produced tangible discoveries. In collaboration with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, students analysed astronomical images to search for asteroids, and their efforts resulted in 72 preliminary asteroid discoveries. In this program, participants examine sequences of telescope images taken minutes apart, looking for the faint, slowly moving points of light that betray a previously uncharted object against the fixed background of stars. Each preliminary discovery must pass through confirmation pipelines before an object receives official designation, but the initial detection, the moment a student first spots an unknown worldlet drifting through the solar system, is real science performed by real observers. Seventy-two such detections from school-based teams represents a substantial contribution to the ongoing census of near-Earth and main-belt asteroids.

On the smallest scales, students collected and analysed micrometeorites through hands-on outdoor and laboratory activities. These cosmic dust particles, typically fractions of a millimetre across, rain down continuously onto Earth’s surface and can be extracted from suitable collection sites such as rooftops and gutters, then examined under microscopes and classified by their characteristic features. The work teaches magnetism, microscopy, classification and the physics of atmospheric entry in a single, tangible exercise. One student, Martina Maze, described simulating the collection of a meteorite with her science teacher Giulio Colombo and discovering how much invisible labor the process entails. Before actually doing it, she said, she did not realize all the work that went into it; once done, she realized that behind the search for a stone lies a whole commitment, since one has to recognize the stone and the meteorite itself, among many other things.

The recognition in Florence carried weight precisely because of where it occurred. The COSPAR Scientific Assembly, organized by the International Science Council’s Committee on Space Research, is the world’s premier space research conference, a biennial gathering where thousands of researchers present results across fields ranging from Earth observation and planetary protection to astrophysics and space life sciences. Presenting student achievements at the Opening Reception of such a meeting, and then sharing the StAnD experience with educators from around the world during the sessions of the COSPAR Panel on Education the following day, signaled that the scientific community regards this model of school-based research as genuinely significant. The students’ work also included the creation of a 2027 calendar featuring astronomical images produced through StAnD activities, a small artifact that encapsulates the project’s blend of rigor and accessibility.

Teachers were central to the project’s design, and StAnD invested heavily in building lasting capacity in schools. Educators were supported through a purpose-built Teacher’s Manual, an online MOOC and two summer schools, resources intended to equip them to deliver STEM topics through inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches long after the project’s formal conclusion. Tabea Mann, an accompanying teacher from Germany, highlighted how the project’s many components interlock: students can observe meteorites or asteroids with the robotic telescopes, then calculate through triangulation where they fall, and then search that area to see whether meteorites can actually be found. Giulio Colombo, Martina’s teacher, said the project gave him the opportunity to put knowledge acquired through the PRISMA project into practice at school, adding that he hopes some seeds have been planted and that meteorite researchers may emerge in the future thanks to this work.

Leaders of the space research community framed the students’ achievements in generational terms. Dr. Jean-Claude Worms, Executive Director of COSPAR, said that StAnD has shown that when students are given real scientific tools and mentorship, they become not just learners but contributors to the global space science endeavour. Rosa Doran, Chair of the COSPAR Panel on Education and President of NUCLIO, a partner in the project, said the students celebrated in Florence represent the future of space science, having demonstrated remarkable curiosity, dedication and scientific ability throughout the project. She expressed the hope that this recognition marks the beginning of their scientific journeys, and that one day the assembly might welcome them back, not as students but as researchers presenting discoveries of their own.

Behind the celebration stands a broad European partnership. StAnD was led by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy, with INAF’s Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino serving as leading partner, and brought together organizations working in astronomy, education and science outreach from Italy, France, Portugal, Greece and Germany: COSPAR, NUCLIO, Ellinogermaniki Agogi and FTP-Europlanet. Over three years the collaboration developed educational resources, teacher-training materials and practical activities designed to remain available to schools beyond the project’s lifetime, funded under Erasmus+, the European Union’s education, training, youth and sport program. As the project formally concludes, its legacy rests on a simple but powerful demonstration: space science is not merely something to read about. For more than 2,000 young people and their teachers, it became something they could actively do, and 72 preliminary asteroid discoveries, along with a cohort of students now visible on the world stage, stand as evidence that the approach works.

Subject of Research: Student participation in planetary defence research through the Erasmus+ StAnD education project

Article Title: Europe's young planetary defenders recognized on world stage as Erasmus+ StAnD Project concludes

Article References: Europe's young planetary defenders recognized on world stage as Erasmus+ StAnD Project concludes. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: planetary defence, StAnD project, Erasmus+, COSPAR, asteroid discovery, meteorites, micrometeorites, STEM education, robotic telescopes, PRISMA, INAF, space science education

The research team, led by Sarah O’Donovan and Lisa Ryan of Atlantic Technological University in Galway, Ireland, together with collaborators in Sweden, France, Romania, and Ukraine, undertook a structured curriculum review as part of the Erasmus+ co-funded Nutrition Education for HealthCare Professionals consortium. Their method was deliberately grounded in the documents that actually govern what students learn. The researchers first identified publicly available curricula and programme module descriptions for undergraduate programmes in each target discipline, then mapped nutrition-related learning outcomes and assessments, and finally analysed how well the content covered key thematic areas such as patient-centred care, digital health, behaviour change, and public health. Data were synthesised using descriptive analysis to surface recurrent patterns and gaps across countries and disciplines.

The scale of the review lends it weight. The team analysed 41 medicine programmes, 44 nursing programmes, 37 pharmacy programmes, and 38 physiotherapy programmes across the five countries, dissecting nearly five thousand modules in total. Because the analysis relied on official curricula, module descriptors, and handbooks rather than surveys or interviews, it captures what institutions formally commit to teaching, not merely what educators believe they cover. That distinction matters: a learning outcome that never appears in a module descriptor is unlikely to be reliably taught, timetabled, or examined, and graduates can qualify without ever being formally assessed on it.

The headline finding is stark. Across all 4,964 modules, nutrition was most commonly embedded implicitly within biomedical or clinical subjects rather than delivered as standalone content. In practice, this means a student might encounter a passing reference to malnutrition inside a gastroenterology lecture or a mention of dietary considerations in a pharmacology module, without any guarantee that the underlying nutritional science, assessment skills, or counselling techniques are systematically built upon. Implicit embedding makes nutrition education fragile: it depends on individual lecturers choosing to include it, and it disappears from the record when those individuals move on.

The country comparison revealed striking variation in how visible nutrition is within official curricula. Romania demonstrated the highest proportion of explicit nutrition modules at 14 percent, followed by Sweden at 7 percent, Ireland at 4 percent, Ukraine at 3 percent, and France at just 2 percent. Even the best-performing country in the sample left the overwhelming majority of modules without explicit nutrition content, and the sevenfold spread between Romania and France suggests that national regulatory frameworks, accreditation standards, and professional bodies play a decisive role in determining whether nutrition is treated as a core competency or an optional afterthought. For a single European labour market in which health professionals increasingly move across borders, such divergence raises questions about whether graduates in different countries arrive with comparable baseline capabilities in dietary care.

The disciplinary patterns were equally revealing. Medicine and pharmacy programmes focused primarily on biomedical and disease-related nutrition, emphasising metabolism, nutrient biochemistry, and the role of diet in disease processes. Nursing programmes more frequently incorporated applied, patient-centred content, reflecting the profession’s hands-on role in feeding, monitoring, and supporting patients. Physiotherapy programmes addressed nutrition mainly in rehabilitation and chronic disease contexts, where diet intersects with recovery, exercise, and long-term condition management. Each discipline, in other words, has developed a partial lens on nutrition that mirrors its clinical role, but none appears to provide comprehensive coverage spanning prevention, assessment, intervention, and behaviour change.

That disciplinary siloing has practical consequences at the bedside. Modern nutrition care is inherently interdisciplinary: a malnourished older patient may need a physician to diagnose the underlying cause, a nurse to implement and monitor a feeding plan, a pharmacist to check for drug-nutrient interactions, and a physiotherapist to ensure that nutritional rehabilitation translates into restored muscle function and mobility. If each professional is trained only in their narrow slice of the problem, and if the training is implicit rather than explicit, the seams between professions become points where nutritional risk is missed. The review’s authors argue that the findings highlight the need for more visible and consistent integration of contemporary, practice-oriented nutrition competencies across healthcare curricula.

The gaps extend beyond basic nutritional science into the domains that increasingly define modern diet-related care. The study specifically probed coverage of patient-centred care, digital health, behaviour change, and public health, thematic areas that reflect how nutrition is actually practised in the 2020s. Helping a patient with type 2 diabetes change long-standing eating habits requires counselling and behaviour-change skills, not just biochemical knowledge. Telehealth consultations and nutrition apps are now routine parts of care pathways. And with obesity and diet-related chronic disease dominating the public health burden across Europe, frontline clinicians are expected to engage with prevention at a population level. A curriculum that teaches nutrient metabolism but omits behaviour change leaves graduates technically informed yet practically unequipped for the conversations that determine whether patients actually change what they eat.

Why has nutrition education lagged so far behind its clinical importance? The review’s structure offers clues. Curricula in health professional programmes are notoriously overcrowded, and nutrition competes for hours against disciplines with strong examination traditions and dedicated departments. Because nutrition is frequently dispersed across other subjects, it lacks the institutional ownership, dedicated faculty, and assessment infrastructure that consolidate a topic into the curriculum. The multi-country design of this study also suggests that where national bodies explicitly require nutrition content, as appears to be the case to a greater degree in Romania, programmes respond; where requirements are vague or absent, nutrition quietly evaporates. The authors position their findings as a framework for targeted curriculum enhancement and future collaborative curriculum development across institutions, implying that the remedy lies in deliberate, coordinated design rather than hoping individual educators fill the void.

The implications reach well beyond the five countries studied. Europe faces a rising tide of diet-related disease, ageing populations with complex nutritional needs, and growing recognition that malnutrition, both undernutrition and overnutrition, worsens surgical outcomes, prolongs hospital stays, and drives healthcare costs. Health professional education is the upstream intervention point: every physician, nurse, pharmacist, and physiotherapist trained today will practise for decades, and the nutritional competencies they carry into that practice are being set now, in the module descriptors and handbooks this study dissected. The picture that emerges from nearly five thousand modules is one of fragmented foundations, in the study’s own words, with nutrition present in fragments but absent as a coherent, visible, assessable competency. For educators, regulators, and professional bodies across Europe, the message is that if nutrition is everyone’s business in principle, it is currently no one’s curriculum in practice, and closing that gap will require the kind of systematic, cross-border collaboration this review itself exemplifies.

Subject of Research: Nutrition education in undergraduate medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy curricula across five European countries

Article Title: Fragmented foundations: a comparative review of nutrition education in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy programmes across five European countries

Article References: O’Donovan, S., McDonagh, M., Willmer, M., Engstrom, M., Fortrat, J.-O., Le Ray, A.-M., Dejeu, I., Saveanu, T., & Ryan, L. (2026). Fragmented foundations: a comparative review of nutrition education in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy programmes across five European countries. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10536-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10536-9

Keywords: nutrition education, medical education, curriculum review, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, Europe, healthcare professionals, Erasmus+, public health, behaviour change, patient-centred care