FAO elearning Academy

What the FAO elearning Academy is

The FAO elearning Academy is the online course platform of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Its home page opens with "A better world begins with learning" and describes the offer as "a wide variety of free multilingual and certified courses organized into 25 thematic areas". It is a learner product in the MOOC mold: anyone can register, take courses on agriculture, food systems and rural development, and earn a certificate. The Academy names its learners as researchers, university professors, young professionals, scientists, government officials, donors, and representatives of non-governmental and civil society organizations, and says they use the courses "to make a meaningful change in agriculture, food security, and beyond." The site can be read in Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, and offers an app install.

The 25 thematic areas

The catalog's thematic areas are listed on the home page: agricultural risk management and resilience; carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions; child labor and youth employment; climate change and environment; communication and capacity development; decent rural employment; farmer field schools; fisheries and aquaculture; food losses and waste; food safety; food security, nutrition and health; forests and landscape restoration; gender and social protection; livestock, animal health and production; mechanization; migration; plant health and protection; plant production, pre-breeding and crop improvement; responsible governance of tenure; responsible investment in agriculture; rural poverty reduction; soils and water management; sustainable development goal indicators; sustainable food systems; and trade and markets.

The catalog can be filtered by year of publication, from 2006 to 2026, and by whether a course is new, offers certification or is mobile-friendly. The latest courses on the home page show how short many of them are: Understanding family farming (July 2026, 30 minutes), The role of livestock in circular bioeconomy systems (June 2026, 1 hour 30 minutes), Food market governance: Public sector and institutional dynamics (June 2026, 45 minutes) and Strengthening wholesale markets in low- and middle-income countries (June 2026, 35 minutes).

How the courses teach

The Academy says it "turns technical expertise into impactful, hands-on learning experiences", and its featured video is about immersive learning: how simulation-based games enable strategic decision making. The main menu adds a Certification section, webinars, a repository, a partners page and help and support. Certification is described on a dedicated page as certification with digital badges, published in several languages.

For anyone designing courses themselves, the Academy publishes E-learning methodologies and good practices, "A guide for designing and delivering e-learning solutions from the FAO elearning Academy", alongside a downloadable course catalog and yearly reports of major achievements from 2019 to 2025. It also ran a 24-hour Global Marathon for Sustainability, Food for Earth, in 2020 and 2021.

Four Betters for universities

The Academy also works with higher education. The FAO Four Betters Courses initiative, "Launched during World Food Forum 2024", partners with academic institutions around the world "to enrich university curricula with FAO's free, certified and multilingual elearning courses." Its catalog of resources for academia supports the 2030 Agenda through more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems "for better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life, leaving no one behind." Each of the four Betters groups courses into its own areas: Better Production covers livestock, fisheries, mechanization, farmer field schools, monitoring and evaluation and plant health; Better Nutrition covers food security, food losses, food safety, markets and trade, integrated food security phase classification and healthy diets; Better Environment covers emissions, climate, forests, soils and water, biodiversity and bioeconomy; Better Life covers risk management, responsible investment, gender, tenure, rural poverty, decent rural employment and child labor.

The stories section on the home page shows where this lands, with pieces such as The New Joint MSc for Sustainable Food Security, IPPC Courses in Universities, Strengthening Latin American Academia, Boosting Agriculture Economists in Africa, Training Tools for Animal Health, Pacific Plant Health Leaders, Promoting Responsible Antibiotic Use, Eradicating Child Labor and Youth Forest Monitoring in Ghana.

The Virtual Learning Centers

A second FAO platform, the Virtual Learning Centers (VLCs), is "dedicated to developing tailored learning for advancing Animal Health and One Health capacities around the world". It has regional centers for Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Near East and North Africa, Southern Africa and West Africa, along with courses, communities of practice, a One Health Knowledge Nexus and a results dashboard. Its home page reports that more than 81,000 people have accessed the VLCs, more than 34,000 have completed courses, 51% of trainees completing courses are women, and more than 3,000 people have joined the One Health Knowledge Nexus.

Learner comments on the VLC home page name courses on African swine fever for resource-limited settings, an introduction to One Health, lumpy skin disease preparedness, and farm biosecurity for veterinary paraprofessionals. One learner writes that "The time allowed for self-paced learning is appropriate to balance work", and another that "The interactive components, such as case studies and group discussions, enhanced understanding and retention."

The VLC privacy notice explains how records are handled. The site stores name, e-mail, gender, age, employment role and location, plus course completion, grades and forum messages. If an employer or government veterinary service nominated a learner for training, completion data is shared with that agency; a learner who signed up personally has no completion data shared. The notice gives the FAO's address in Rome.

Support

The Academy lists one e-mail address for general inquiries and another for technical support on its courses, and the VLCs have their own contact address. The VLC platform is powered by Moodle and offers a mobile app, with how-to pages on creating an account, writing a biography, joining discussions and managing e-mail notifications.

Who it suits

The FAO elearning Academy suits anyone working in or studying agriculture, food security, nutrition, forestry, fisheries or rural development who wants short, free courses from the FAO itself, with certification and digital badges. University lecturers can build its courses into their programs through Four Betters, and veterinary and animal health staff, including those nominated by an employer or a government veterinary service, will find the VLCs' One Health courses aimed squarely at them. What a learner earns is course certification, not a degree, so the Academy works best next to a formal qualification rather than in place of one.