Tuesday 28 June 2011

Presentation at e-Health Conference 28th June 2011


E health presentation 28th june 2011


The presentation will examine a collaborative model for sharing OERs between veterinary schools through a wiki.  The session will describe the lessons learnt from the JISC funded Opening Veterinary Access to Literature (OVAL) project. This is intended to trigger discussion as to how academic institutions can collaborate effectively with commercial publishers in the development of free to access learning resources.
The intended learning outcomes include an appreciation of the issues involved in sharing OERs and the application of the MEDEV OOER toolkit to support this process. More specifically, the session will discuss how OERs can be adapted from existing published texts to generate educationally valuable, quality resources which are open access.
The WikiVet project has now been running for a 4 year period. In that time over 10,000 individuals have registered with the site representing over 198 veterinary schools from 68 countries. The presentation will explain how the WikiVet environment has assisted in the publishing of OERs in an accessible format. A comparison will be made with other approaches to repositories for OERs including JORUM and the case will be made for new thinking on the most effective publishing models for the future.
The relevance of this session to the wider healthcare community includes exposure to new working practices which help address current shortfalls in funding for resource development. This will include developing business models which facilitate collaboration between corporate partners and academia with benefits for both.
To date review and evaluation of the project has been limited to feedback from small focus groups and statistical review of site usage. The session will explore ways that these OER initiatives can improve feedback and evaluation in order to better focus provision on the needs of an international audience.
Further information on WikiVet and the OVAL project can be found at http://en.wikivet.net/OVAL. A compilation of key blogs relating to OERs is available on the MEDEV site at http://goo.gl/T4Zwe.

References:
Scase, T., Brown, G., Cox, B., Short, N., Smith, K., Whittlestone, K., Hammond, R. and Rhind, S. (2008) 'The WikiVet community of practice', The Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine Newsletter 01, no. 17, Autumn 2008 pp. 15-16. ISSN 1740-8768 Also available online at:http://www.medev.ac.uk/newsletter/01.17/ accessed [5 May 2011], ISSN 1479-523X.
Brown, G., Quentin-Baxter, M. and Belshaw, Z. (2010) ‘WikiVet: building a community of practice to support a self-sustaining wiki for veterinary education’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp.183–196.