Abstract:

Background:
Without exaggeration, wine can be described as one of the most complicated educational topics and product categories on earth (Stöckl, 2014). Consumer information and education are seen to be the only way to "promote" Europe's individual wine regions and its’ myriad of appellations, varietals, and styles. It has been proven that wine education, training and tastings are a strong tool to make consumers discover new tastes, and create awareness, knowledge, and bonds. Spreading and/or increasing wine know-how is the most efficient and effective way to foster emotional attachments and sell higher quality and more expensive wines (Thode & Maskulka, 1998).

THE “ONLINE WINE COURSES” PROJECT is an Erasmus+ funded venture involving three European universities. Its’ goal is to design and carry out remote online wine and beverage classes including tastings with wines and other beverages. It involves a comprehensive framework for online trainings as well as online tasting schemes. Courses are video recorded and then provided in video and/or audio format (podcast). The learning content is then made available in video clips free of charge via YouTube. In the online wine tutorials regional maps, illustrations of climate influencing factors, photos of soil types in the area as well as pictures of the dominating grape varieties are displayed among many other visual cues. Also, a glossary with specific wine terms is created in different languages. For each important wine region a set of vocabulary related to its’ specific regions is provided. In order to assess training success and gained knowledge, online tests, quizzes and final exams including wine (blind-)tasting tasks and grading schemes are created.

Research aim:
The purpose of our empirical study on online wine courses is to find out how well online students perform in the quizzes and tests compared to students who had face-to-face training on the same topic.

Methodology:
One class of semester six students (n=26) of our university's Bachelor program "International Wine Business" will be divided into two groups (n=13 each). One, that will study two wine countries with the help of our online training scheme “Online Wine Courses” and one, that attends “classic” face-to-face lectures in class. The class will be divided into the two groups randomly by listing them in alphabetical order and putting all even numbered students (2,4,6, etc.) in group A (the video tutorial group) and all odd numbered students (1,3,5, etc.) in group B (the classic face-to-face lecture group). Before taking the classes, students will have to sit a test on the respective wine country. The effectiveness of face-to-face as well as online courses will be assessed by calculating the difference between each student’s score before and after each session. By using mean, mode, median and range values, we will be able to express group “performance” and make deductions concerning the effectiveness of both training schemes.

Analysis:
By determining the arithmetic mean as well as the median and the modal value, we expect to gain insight into whether the online courses or the face-to-face tutorials lead to higher knowledge gains. In addition, we run statistical procedures in SPSS to identify significant differences (or not). Various cross-tabulations, e.g., including age, gender, and country-of-origin of the students, may provide interesting, additional insights.

Keywords:

Online tutorials, effectivity, comparison to face-to-face lectures, wine education.