Experiences in Teaching Veterinary Public Health across Latin-America and Europe: the SAPUVETNET III Project

Experiences in Teaching Veterinary Public Health across Latin-America and Europe: the SAPUVETNET III Project SAPUVETNET III (n. DCI-LA/2008/75) is the third phase of a series of projects, co-financed under the EU ALFA programme, aimed to support a VPH network constituted by Faculties of Veterinary Medicine of 12 Latin-american and 6 European countries in addition to various collaborating institutions/organizations both at national and international level (http://www.sapuvetnet.org). The project envisages the development and the implementation of a common VPH curriculum, through the use of innovative teaching methods, mainly based on problem solving approach. The authors present here some teaching material developed by the project as an example of new strategies/approach for teaching VPH: case studies, videos and self-learning programme on meat inspection/food hygiene, an Interactive Manual on VPH, as well as e-conferences on upcoming VPH issues. Project partners use a mail-list and distance learning platforms (e.g. Moodle, Colibri) to organize teaching activities. A Journal, “Una Salud/One Health/Uma Saúde”, is also published and distributed both as hard copy or .pdf through the web. Didactic tools produced by the SAPUVETNET projects have been and/or are being tested and used by the partner faculties and other teaching institutions, both for under and post-graduate courses. Teaching material by SAPUVETNET is distributed according to Creative Common criteria and policy (http://creativecommons.org/). It can be freely circulated and distributed, it can be used for distance learning and can be modified/adapted to the local context at each country/geographical area, even outside Latin-America and Europe. Teaching products produced under the SAPUVETNET projects are available at the URL http://www.sapuvetnet.org, or can be obtained from the project co-ordinator(s) and/or the contact persons at the partner Faculties/Universities. The Authors would like to acknowledge all participants/collaborators/partners of the current and previous SAPUVETNET projects who greatly contributed –in different moments and at different levels- to the development of the teaching tools herein described.