MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

Over the last 12 years the CLIVE consortium (http://www.clive.ed.ac.uk) has produced a large bank of learning resources, supporting many subject areas in veterinary undergraduate education and reaching into continuing professional development. These resources, delivered principally over Local Area Networks, vary from focussed 15 minute tutorials and quizzes to interactive courses with multiple learning objectives and many hours of interactive study.

Within this bank are thousands of potential Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs). Most of these resources were written using Macromedia Authorware. Recent versions of Authorware allow content to be packaged as SCORM 1.2 compliant RLOs, which could, in theory, be imported into VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments).

Although this is likely to be the quickest route for producing RLOs, technically it is not necessarily the best. We have already experienced significant difficulties in configuring our computer labs with the upgraded web player to deliver all recent versions of Authorware. The requirement for this special Internet-browser plug-in is likely to make these objects less attractive for uptake by others.

For this pilot study, we are making several versions of a limited number of objects to assess the effort required to adopt differing approaches - Authorware, Flash, web pages. We are using the JISC project RELOAD editor to package the results. The resultant objects are targeted at the Day 1 competencies identified in the QAA benchmarks for veterinary science ( http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/phase2/vet_sci.pdf).

CLIVE is in the fortunate position of having in place a collaborative agreement between the six UK vet schools. However, it is still essential to contact authors for permission to re-purpose their work. We began by mapping 43 CLIVE learning packages against Day 1 competencies, concentrating initially on those originating in Edinburgh and Glasgow. We have been delighted with the response of authors - no-one has refused, and some have identified a need to update their work. This we regard as an added benefit.

Our first RLOs describe basic procedures in dermatology, with videos. Other topics are likely to include anaesthetics, pathology and anatomy. Decisions about the best level of granularity have to be made and this varies with the resource. Some videos will stand alone, as will some images. There is the added problem, widely discussed (for example Littlejohn, A. (2003)), of whether context should be included. The concept of context-free content is almost a non-sequitur, except for the finest-grain object such as an image. The time-constraint of cataloguing the most granular elements, so that they may be used by others outside the discipline, is one that we do not aim to overcome. However, we do aim to make full descriptions, which may still enable those from other disciplines to find useful resources.

The approach we are taking is to make a best guess at this, then send results to authors and reviewers so that there is something concrete to view and discuss. Annotations (by others) provide a route for additional uses to accrue to an object.

Questions extend beyond the level of granularity. Glasgow is using the Universitas 21 repository, Edinburgh is trialling IntraLibrary. For this pilot project, to ensure access for both schools, we shall upload to both repositories, with possibly varying metadata, depending on preferred profiles. We hope this will be a temporary problem while institutions sort out access for collaborative projects.

Cataloguing requires collaboration with librarians to agree classification and discipline-specific vocabularies and to check that cataloguing is good - accurate and of sufficient depth to enable discovery. This is all challenging but, perhaps, the biggest challenge lies ahead - to encourage others to use the re-usable.