MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

For those who could not make this event, it was an opportunity to showcase the achievements of the JISC-funded Opening Veterinary Access to Literature (OVAL) project.  It was also (during the afternoon) the launch of the Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum (OVAM) project.

Nick Short opened the conference and explained the necessary housekeeping information then handed over to Barbra Stanikova to give an overview of the project and a demonstration of the resources created. We heard from the publisher's perspective (CABI and Manson), the developer's perspective (Chris Trace) and the user view was presented by 2 Royal Vet students (a third year and a fifth year) who had time to join us in between rotations.  Nick Short then presented the 'lessons learned' from OVAL and what we could take forward.

I'd been invited to give a brief overview of the new PublishOER project building on the foundations of the OVAL project and the lessons learned.  I explained how we were working with publishers to be able to use copyrighted educational content without risk. I think I did it justice - I got some great feedback and many people commented on the size/challenge of the project. My slides are available here.

I love to attend events that actually say "11.30 Coffee and cake" on the agenda ;)

After coffee, Professor Stephen May gave an insightful talk about the use of anatomy in the veterinary curriculum explaining the history of anatomy teaching and how it has progressed from a traditional format (using cadavers) to some schools who now use virtual imaging and pots.  Examples of e-learning and anatomy were demonstrated from many of the schools (RVC, Universidad de Murcia, University College, Dublin and Murdoch University) and from Morpho-Imaging (a university company from Belgium). There were some very elegant dissections and animations.

Manson Publishing and Elsevier were invited to comment how they foresaw their content being 'sliced up' and used as digital content.  They seemed keen to continue to contribute to the collection of content to enhance the already-existing pedagogical content.

The online veterinary anatomy museum (OVAM) will involve more than 10 vet schools, some FE colleges and other partners (e.g. MEDEV, the British Racing School, etc.).  Key publishers (Elsevier and Manson) are involved and the project will adhere to the OER principles.  They will develop an intuitive environment - not like a traditional museum - so content can be taken away and repurposed. 

After lunch we talked about the content of OVAM, i.e. what types and formats should we put into OVAM? There were a few demonstrations from Utretcht and Anatomy.tv which gave us food for thought.

There were long discussions about key issues:

• whether to try to contain comparative human anatomy and it was decided that there is already so much human-anatomy resource available elsewhere that perhaps we shouldn't reinvent the wheel?

• should the resources be pitched at different levels? i.e. vet/vet nurse students, graduates - or even schools? The consensus was to focus on the HE/FE sector and then later focus on pre-entry students.
• clinical versus pre-clinical - not sure we answered that one.
• should this be student-driven or expert-driven? Where's the momentum going to come from? Where does the pedagogy come from? Do we need 2 experts - one for anatomy and one for pedagogy? Should recent graduates be the 'student - expert'? Again, there were mixed views but it was decided that the recent graduate is key in producing new materials.

Nick Short thanked everyone (approx. 40 attendees) for attending and we look to see great things from this project. For more details about OVAM see http://en.wikivet.net/OVAM

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It's been a long day and my brain is buzzing - there's been a lot to take in but I found it very rewarding.  It's also been great to catch up with vet chums and others! :) 

Right - off to catch a train now!