MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Below is the abstract that has been accepted at the forthcoming eLearning in health: collaboration, sharing and sustainability in the current environment conference.

A strategy for encouraging sharing: open educational resources (OER) in clinical settings

Lindsay Wood, Gillian Brown, Nigel Purcell, Suzanne Hardy, Megan Quentin-Baxter, Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry & Veterinary Medicine (MEDEV)

Practice based education is essential to training healthcare students, but significant technological and cultural barriers exist with sharing resources for staff and students. Pathways to Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education (PORSCHE) developed a sharing infrastructure across NHS/HE domains and aimed for seamless access to resources. Accredited Clinical Teaching Online Resources (ACTOR), a consortium of 5 UK HEIs delivering postgraduate programmes in clinical education, supported academic development of those involved in teaching students of human and animal healthcare.

PORSCHE attempted to resolve technical issues: NHS staff couldn’t upload resources to Jorum, while HEI staff could neither download/upload to NeLR, preventing effective discovery and sharing. ACTOR concentrated on building an informed community able to share content, licensed with Creative Commons, relevant to clinical education programmes.

Using the MEDEV good practice risk assessment toolkit, resources mapped against institutional policies and procedures in consent, IPR, copyright and quality assurance, were uploaded according to contextual guidance for improvement to local policies and procedures. The projects aimed to facilitate easy sharing of resources in practice contexts by actively engaging in developing and disseminating resources and strategies to the clinical education developers, through workshops and online events. The ACTOR community was used to test the outcomes of the PORSCHE project and together they actively disseminated good practice in sharing across clinical and academic settings. 

Success will be determined by:

• Ability to showcase OER in eLearning healthcare education in clinical and academic contexts.
• Establishment of a basis for a long term NHS/HEI partnership demonstrated by sharing of appropriately licensed content
• Widespread uptake of MEDEV good practice risk assessment and NHS eLearning Readiness toolkits via an effective community of practice
• Raised awareness over consent issues in using clinical recordings in teaching
• Acknowledgement of the value of sharing in enhancing student experiences in clinical placements.

Full programme for conference is here. Contact me if you would like to know more about the above projects.

^LW