AFSI Newsletter - May 2026 | | Highlighting Our E-Learning Courses on Biotechnology, Biosafety, and Food Safety | | The Agriculture & Food Systems Institute (AFSI) has long sought to address the challenges of capacity building in locations where infrastructure and other factors may limit in-person training by making educational resources available globally, continuously, and at no cost. Our e-learning catalog grew out of that mission and now comprises nine peer-reviewed courses on biotechnology, biosafety, and food safety, many of which have been translated into languages other than English. The courses serve as both a complement to our more intensive in-person technical trainings and as standalone resources for students, regulators, researchers, and industry professionals seeking to enhance their knowledge of the field. | | | | From Genetics to Field Trials | We tailored our six biosafety courses to build internal capacity among professionals who conduct or commission environmental risk assessments, such as regulators, risk assessors, and industry scientists, as well as early-career researchers interested in the field. Topics range from foundational (plant and animal biotechnology fundamentals) to procedural (problem formulation, non-target organism testing, and confined field trials). These courses guide students through the science and regulation of genetically engineered (GE) crops, from the laboratory to the development of a regulatory dossier. | | We developed our three food safety courses for professionals who evaluate novel foods, such as regulators, food safety officials, and quality assurance professionals. They introduce the foundational concepts of safety assessment for novel foods and feed, demonstrate how problem formulation can be applied to that assessment, and address the specific case of genetically engineered animal products. They establish how regulators and consumers alike weigh information about new foods, how that conceptual framework gets applied in practice to GE crops, and how these principles extend to livestock and animal-derived foods. | | | | | A Globally Distributed Audience | Our learners represent regulatory agencies, academic institutions, private companies, and student populations from across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. English is the platform’s working language, but translations are added when there is concrete demand from a training partner and funding to support their addition. Our long-standing collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) drove the Spanish translations across the catalog, and the most completed course on our platform last quarter was the Spanish version of our foundational food safety course. | | A Complement to In-Person Training | While our online resources are not a substitute for in-person workshops and technical training, they prepare participants beforehand and reinforce concepts afterward. Most of our recent in-person trainings, including our series of workshops in South Korea, our capacity building work in South Asia, and our workshops on environmental risk assessment of non-target organisms for regulators from Africa and Asia, paired in-person sessions with preparatory e-learning modules. | | | Every course on our platform is peer-reviewed and built on sound science and a strong evidence base. Once enrolled, learners can revisit any module at any time, making the catalog useful both as a first introduction and as an ongoing reference. Our catalog continues to grow as new technical areas emerge and as our partners identify regulatory communities that would benefit from our online resources. We welcome inquiries from organizations interested in using our e-learning courses to build internal capacity or in working with us to develop new courses. | | | | |
