Digital learning experience design and research of a self-paced online course for risk-based inspection of food imports

The growth in trade of food across international borders requires authorities to be trained to promote food safety and risk-based inspection. Online training for risk-based food import controls is a promising approach. In this study, we focused on the development and refinement of a self-paced online course to teach risk-based inspection of food imports, in short RIFI. We applied educational design research and research to improve methodology along with heuristics evaluations, a user experience study, and a learner experience study with statistically significant pre/posttests and a total of 56 participants, mostly from the United States. The result indicates that the course is useable and shows learning efficacy. The majority of the participants (94%) gained knowledge after taking the course. However, looking deeper into the data, only 35% of participants met the targeted postscore based on the learning growth scale. This denotes the needs for refining the course. There is room for improvement in layout, terminology, data entry, comprehensiveness, and feedback. Our study suggests that the emerging field of learning experience design combines multiple literacies as it expands on instructional design, user experience as well as teaching and learning skills. In the future, further development of content and activities, including another module, is planned.