SLOHSIG meeting at OER2010

Things have been quiet over the winter, but here’s hoping that  SLOHSIG will pick up a bit of oomph in the Spring. A meeting of the SIG has been arranged by my colleague Richard Windle at the OER2010 conference in Cambridge. The date, time and venue are as follows:

Time and date: 13.30-15.00  Tuesday 23 March 2010.

Venue:  SCORE Room, Gillespie Centre, Clare College, University of Cambridge

No agenda has been written as yet, so do please get in touch with me or add a comment to this blog entry if you’d like to add items to discuss. We’ll be following up on action points from the inaugural SIG meeting in Coventry – see the post “Inaugural meeting: outcomes ” on the this blog for details.

We’ve arranged the meeting for this conference in the hopes that:

a) some SLOHSIG members will be attending the conference
b) we’ll pick up interest from conference delegates and get some of them to come along

Although the conference isn’t specific to healthcare, there is a strong healthcare strand in the programme , with Richard Windle and Heather Wharrad from the University of Nottingham School of Nursing, Midwifery & Physiotherapy presenting sessions on learning objects in healthcare, and giving a symposium on the second day with Nicola Siminson from Jorum and other health e-learning practitioners.

The SLOHSIG aim of a “‘one-stop shop’ of e-learning resources for teachers, learners and practitioners in healthcare” is becoming more pressing with time, so it would be good to get moving and implement practical measures to this end.

The meeting is open not just to SLOHSIG ‘members’ but to all colleagues in healthcare and healthcare education with an interest in e-learning and reusing online  resources. Do please alert colleagues whom you think might be interested.

See you in Cambridge

Cheers

Fred

Fred Riley
Learning Technologist
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy, University of Nottingham
Vcard: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/about/fr_uon.vcf



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)

Unsung/undiscovered healthcare e-learning resources

One of the action points to come out of the inaugural SLOHSIG meeting was a ‘scoping exercise’, to get an idea of the number and range of healthcare e-learning resources that are freely available online, but aren’t in a formal digital resource repository such as Jorum. A major problem for teachers and students finding usable resources is that they’re scattered around many unconnected and difficult to find sites, which informs the major SLOHSIG goal of a ‘one-stop shop’ which aggregates all these unsung resources behind a simple search interface (such as the IRISS Learning Exchange).

This ongoing blog entry is an attempt to list freely-available, and freely-usable, resources and resource collections, to give us all an idea of the number and quality of online resources that we’ll need to aggregate, and to be included in the eventual ‘one-stop shop’. It’s not a definitive reference list, but rather a rough guide to what’s out there. Rules for inclusion:

1. The site must be a primary site on which the resources are hosted, not another list of links to resources elsewhere.
2. The resources must be freely available for non-profit educational purposes.
3. The resources must have some intrinsic instructional content.
4. The site owner must have given her/his written permission for the resources to be publicised, either on the site or in an email.

The conditions above might seem restrictive, but even following those we’re going to end up with tens, likely hundreds of resources. The list needs to be a collective work, so contributions are very welcome. Whether you’re a SLOHSIG contributor or a colleague in healthcare, do please post resources that fit the above criteria in the comments to this blog.

Resource list

SONET Reusable Learning Objects

Clinical Skills Resources. Provided by the CETL for Clinical & Communication Skills, Queen Mary University, London.

Online Learning Resources from the Leeds University School of Healthcare.

Nursing Standard Quick Reference Guides. Short guides for nurses on clinical skills and patient care.

Virtual Analytic Laboratory. Interactive multimedia resouces on bioscience lab skills, produced by Viv Rolfe.

UCEL Learning Objects

From Laurian – a couple of other interesting initiatives for starters BUT may not fulfil all of the listed criteria (sorry about that) and I have not yet considered the implications of number 4!

MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Biology/

SONIC scenarios http://www.uclan.ac.uk/health/schools/school_of_nursing/studying_in_school_of_nursing/sonic/scenarios/scenarios.php

Virtual Health Care Team scenarios http://www.vhct.org/studies.htm

OU OpenLearn http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/category.php?id=6

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health open courseware http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/EpiInfectiousDisease/lectureNotes.cfm

UMass Boston Courseware http://ocw.umb.edu/

Tufts OpenCourseware http://ocw.tufts.edu/

MERLOT http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?category=2699&&

SkillStat http://www.skillstat.com/

Think it will be interesting to see the outputs of e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) but I am not sure if they will be freely available and in the public domain?

 

Inaugural meeting of SLOHSIG

The first meeting of the SIG will take place on Monday, 5th October, 2009, 10am-3pm. It willl be hosted by the Centre for Interprofessional e-learning (CIPeL) at Coventry University. All colleagues interested in sharing e-learning resources in healthcare are invited to attend, whether ‘members’ of the SIG or not.

Agenda

• Introductions and Aims of SIG
• Conference Outcomes – communities, collaboration, relationships and sharing
• “One stop shop” for learning Objects – ways forward
• Breakout sessions to discuss specific topics (e.g. harvesting )
• Plenary – reports and discussion of the way forward
• Next SLOHSIG meeting

There will be a lunch break with a buffet lunch provided. Attendance is free, courtesy of CiPEL and SONET.

Registration and further information

Please contact Elinor Clarke (e.clarke@coventry.ac.uk) for further details or to register for the event. Do please let us know, either by emailing Elinor directly or adding a comment to this blog entry, if you’ll be attending so that we have some idea of numbers for catering. Further contact details are on the CIPEL website.

Location and directions

CIPEL is located on the Coventry University campus, in Coventry city centre. There’s a travel page on the Coventry University website with useful travel information, an interactive campus map, and directions. CIPEL is located in the James Starley Building, which is building 6 on the Coventry University campus map (PDF).

Accommodation

No accommodation is available for the event, but the following are possibilities within taxi range of the venue:

• Ramada Hotel (Coventry city centre, can walk to Uni easily from here)
• The Village Hotel (Coventry – would need a taxi to get to Uni)
• Hotel Ibis (Coventry City Centre- can walk to Uni easily from here)
• The Old Mill Bagington (Coventry suburb – need a taxi to get to Uni)

Sharing in practice

As sharing learning objects is the raison d’être of SLOHSIG, it would be worth exploring what ‘sharing’ means, and how it might be implemented. The rationale for sharing is clear:

• on the supply side, there are uncountable zillions of e-learning resources that have been developed by universities, the NHS, colleges and other institutions, and by individuals, which the creators are happy to share with the healthcare community. And that’s just within the UK.
• on the demand side, teachers, students and healthcare workers want and need to access free-to-use high-quality (in terms of content as well as technical quality) online learning resources, and to find them quickly and easily. A very clear theme to come out of the Sharing Learning Objects in Healthcare conference was that of a ‘one-stop shop’, a simple and searchable repository of usable resources [1]

Behind these two desires lie a mountain of logistical, political and above all technical challenges which this SIG will be addressing. Issues that need to be explored include, in no particular order:

• what is meant by “sharing”?
• what is it that we want to share?
• the role of digital repositories
• the role of metadata harvesters [2]
• dissemination of learning resources
• how to ‘harvest’ resources not in repositories
• collaboration and cooperation amongst existing sharing projects (eg Jorum, Intute, CIPEL, IRISS)

Note that I’ve been careful to use the term “resource” rather than ‘learning object’ as there’s no agreed definition of ‘learning object’ [3] and, more importantly, I don’t want to pre-empt discussion on the above by excluding larger e-learning resources.

So the questions I’m asking are:

1. Are these issues which we need to address? Or are some red herrings? What other issues need to be looked at?
2. How do colleagues think that these issues can be resolved, and sharing implemented in practice?
3. What other questions need to be asked?

Discuss

References

[1] In the electronic poll taken in the final conference session, available on the conference site (Powerpoint, 342kb), the following questions were asked:

Question: How can we encourage them to share their resource?
Response: 59% voted for “One stop search”

Q: What would/should national sharing look like?
R: 56% voted for “One stop shop”

It was also very clear from the plenary discussion that this was a common wish.

[2] A famous ‘one-stop-shop’ based on harvesting is OAIster.

[3] The Learning Object FAQ on the SONET site links to some papers exploring possible definitions of the term.

Slide 6

How can we encourage them to share their resource?

Post-conference meeting

A meeting was held immediately after the Sharing Learning Objects in Healthcare conference on March 24th, 2009, where interested delegates gathered to plan future activities on topics that had emerged during the conference. The following are brief notes from that meeting:

Present: Nicola Siminson (Jorum), Heather Wharrad and Richard Windle (SONET-ARC & RLO-CETL), Elinor Clarke (CIPEL), Richard Hayward (Canterbury University), Ian Watson (IRISS), Bernie Davies (CIPEL).

The conference had highlighted that there were lots of open educational resources and repositories available to academics, and also a willingness to share materials though sometimes there was a reluctance to accept offers of free resources due to worries about breaching copyright and licence agreements. There is a real issue of ‘discovery’ of the materials. It was recognised that this conference was attended largely by ‘knowledgeable’ delegates and there was a need to help those new to the elearning field understand the terminology and processes of producing and finding resources. There was a need to have single sign on to access resources (the issue of NHS/HEI access was raised during the conference).

This group would like to move forward some of these issues in a number of ways as listed below.

• Look for funding opportunities: Open Educational Resources via subject centres and JISC
• Publish in newsletters and journals: THES, Community Care magazine, HSAP newsletter, HINow, CAIPE newsletter, Social care publications
• Post issues that emerged from conference to Discussion lists
• Open letter aimed at high level policy makers Council of Deans, HEFCE
• Run workshops on RLO discovery aimed at non-experts
• Code of practice/assessment of RLOs
• Use of LOAM tool to guide practitioners about pedagogical attributes/design

(Notes taken by Dr Heather Wharrad.)

Welcome to SLOHSIG

Welcome to SLOHSIG, the blog of the Sharing Learning Objects in Healthcare Special Interest Group. This SIG was conceived at the Sharing Learning Objects in Healthcare conference held at the University of Nottingham on 24th March, 2009 which was attended by some 70 delegates from all over the UK, and a few from overseas, with an interest in Learning Objects and e-learning repositories and their application to healthcare education. Some of the delegates attended a post-conference meeting in order to take things forward and maintain the momentum of the conference, and to organise similar future conferences annually, and this blog is part of our ongoing project.

The SIG is primarily focussed on the use and reuse of learning objects, and indeed e-learning resources in general, in the teaching of healthcare inUK Higher Education and and the National Health Service. We are also seeking to build sharing and collaboration with colleagues outside the UK. Areas of interest include, but are certainly not restricted to:

• development of learning objects
• embedding learning objects in teaching practice
• e-learning pedagogy
• the use of digital repositories of learning objects
• building Communities of Practice
• facilitating content sharing

The strategic aim of the SIG is to integrate the vast number of teaching resources online into a ‘one-stop shop’ for teachers and students of healthcare, so that they can ‘pick and mix’ from a massive store of e-learning resources to use in their teaching and learning. It quickly became very clear at the conference that there are masses of resources developed, and under development, in UKHE institutions and the NHS, but very few people outside the institution are aware of them. The SIG aims to promote sharing and reuse of these materials, and to promote collaboration amongst colleagues and institutions engaged in learning object development and repositories, both within and outwith the UK.