Inaugural meeting: outcomes

The inaugural SLOHSIG meeting was held on the 5th October at CIPeL in the University of Coventry, and was successful, interesting and productive. There’s nothing to beat face-to-face meetings for getting things talked about and done

The meeting was ably managed and moderated by Elinor Clark, who wrote down the key discussion and action points on a flip chart towards the conclusion. Heather Wharrad took photos of these, which I’ve added to end of this blog entry for reference.

Aims & Objectives

The meeting agreed that the main purpose of the SIG is to move towards a ‘one-stop shop’ of e-learning resources for teachers, learners and practitioners in healthcare. That is, a single online point to which people can come to find resources, rather than having to go to multiple sources to search. This ‘one-stop shop’ should:

• have a simple, minimalist interface
• clearly identify resource types with icons (eg image, video, audio, presentation, e-learning material, etc)
• be simple and quick to use
• incorporate as many publicly-available healthcare e-learning resources as we can find
• incorporate resources developed locally but not yet publicly available

Fred Riley demonstrated one good (the excellent IRISS Learning Exchange) and one not so good (MERLOT advanced search) interface, and how tag clouds can be useful ways to search by keyword.

It was clear to all that behind such a simple ‘one-stop shop’ would be immense technical, administrative and political challenges, and that the project would need to progress in manageable steps to the eventual goal.

Practical outcomes and action points

Scoping exercise

In the short term, the meeting agreed to a ‘scoping exercise’, to try to collect brief details of available resources in healthcare which could be incorporated into a one-stop shop. The recent blog post entitled “Unsung/undiscovered healthcare e-learning resources” is a start to this scoping exercise, and all SIG members are strongly encourage to add resources which they know of and which fit the criteria in the post, either by editing the post directly or adding comments. Resources to be collated include:

• existing repositories of e-learning resources
• existing websites with e-learning resources
• professional bodies
• individuals involved in e-learning

Funding

Because of the immense challenges involved in the ‘one-stop shop’ objective, it was felt that significant staff time and funding would be needed to carry the project forward. With Open Educational Resources (OER) and sharing being hot topics these days, we felt that there could well be funding calls from bodies such as JISC in the near future which SLOHSIG could bid for, and members agreed to keep a close eye out for such calls, and to seek out other sources of funding.

Workshops

Plans were provisionally laid for two workshops on sharing resources in healthcare. These would be very non-technical workshops aimed squarely at teachers and practitioners who may not even have heard of the term e-learning, let alone used any e-learning materials. The meeting felt that there was a large number of colleagues out there who have a lot to contribute but who know nothing, and/or are plain scared, of e-learning, and a strong effort should be made to ‘draw them into the fold’ as users and contributors. Maria Parks provisionally volunteered to run one workshop at York, Richard Windle the other at Nottingham. Dates and detailed venues are to follow.

Jorum Community Bay

SLOHSIG should set up a ‘presence’ on the Jorum Community Bay.

Next SIG meeting

We provisionally set a date for the next SIG meeting, at the OER10 conference to be held at Clare College, Cambridge University, March 22-24 2010. The SLOHSIG raisons d’etre dovetail closely with the aims of the OER movement, and many SIG members will be attending OER10, so we felt that it would be highly appropriate to meet there and try to attract interest from conference delegates.

Flipchart notes

Flipchart notes, page 2

Flipchart notes, page 1

Meeting attendees

In alphabetical order of surname, institution in parentheses:

• Elinor Clark (CIPeL, University of Coventry)
• Sarah Darley (Manchester University)
• Neil Hosker (University of Chester)
• Kate Lomax (NHS repository)
• Maria Parks (York St Johns)
• Fred Riley (University of Nottingham)
• Nicola Siminson (JORUM)
• Heather Wharrad (University of Nottingham)
• Jackie Wickham (Intute)
• Laurian Williamson (Intute)
• Richard Windle (University of Nottingham)

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