Open Access Audio-visual Archive in Animal Sciences

Practical farm experiences are an engaging, dynamic, and effective way for students to learn about agricultural sciences. Yet, such activities are cumbersome to arrange due to organisation challenges, limited animal access availability, student attendance restrictions, and biosafety or privacy concerns. Complementary to excursions and internships, high quality audio-visual material ensures productive and successful learning opportunities for students and a tailored support for lecturers. It is used to convey information for demonstration, training, and examination purposes. This project aims at creating an archive of high-quality video sequences of behaviours of various livestock species (pigs, cattle, poultry, sheep, goats, deer) in different settings such as normal behaviour, illness, pain and distress, maternal behaviour, social interactions, reproduction and handling by carekeepers. In addition, video guided tours of Swiss farms will introduce students to farm husbandry conditions (standard, BTS, RAUS and organic). By providing access to high-quality learning resources and enhancing learning experiences, the project has the potential to increase student engagement and interest in the field, ultimately leading to more knowledgeable and skilled animal scientists in the future within ETH and beyond.

The main goals of this project are:

1/ build an ETH open access animal sciences video database to provide multimodal sequences of behaviour and housing conditions difficult to explain in texts/photos to extend the learning opportunities for students in addition to the existing excursions.

2/ provide a tailored support for lecturers teaching agricultural animal sciences when refining a course by offering lecture material, self-learning, and assessment opportunities to students (quizzes) and diversifying student examination methods (use of videos at examinations).

3/ improve the accessibility and constructive alignment of a course by using video content as a didactic tool in animal sciences and thus provide students with a deeper knowledge of animal sciences.

1/ Innovative aspects:

The use of audio-visual sequences for self-training and examination purposes is not implemented yet in any courses of the curriculum in animal sciences at ETH. This archive serves as a valuable resource for students and educators, allowing them to access visual materials that might otherwise be challenging to obtain. This is particularly important in fields like agricultural sciences where practical experiences are essential but not always easy to arrange.

2/ Added value. The archive will contribute to:

-Complement organisational challenges (e.g. farm experiences).

– Enhance the learning experience by providing a more engaging and interactive medium through first-hand experiences in the classroom and by enabling students to gain exposure to broader content, promoting deeper understanding. Hence, it aims to inspire the next generation of animal scientists. This focus on increasing interest and knowledge in the field is crucial for its long-term sustainability and growth.

– Provide lecturers with a reliable and tailored support by removing the challenge associated with utilizing online photographs and videos that may be encumbered by copyright restrictions and lack the desired level of content, quality and context. This focus on supporting educators with high-quality materials is innovative, as it enhances the teaching process and promotes effective learning.

– Help to promote consistency in the curriculum across years, courses and lecturers (e.g, turnover), ensuring that all students receive the same level of information and instruction.

– Lead to potential knowledge transfer by making the use of video resources available to a wide audience (public).