Over the past month we have had two significant successes with funding from JISC - at a time when funding is particularly hard to find. These will enable to continue to develop our innovative projects working on Open Educational Resources, WikiVet and commercial publishers.
Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum
The JISC Content Programme has provided over £ 130,000 to develop an Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum(OVAM). The project will provide access to a comprehensive set of veterinary anatomical resources which will be presented in an intuitive virtual environment. All the UK veterinary schools have already committed to contribute materials as well as vet schools in Ireland, Spain and Australia. In addition, other partners including Elsevier, Mansons and Morpho Vet Imaging have agreed to provide content for the museum.
The museum will contain a wide range of digital exhibits provided by the partners including e-books, anatomical videos, potcasts, powerpoints, slides, assessments and images (pictured right is a 3D Image of Foal with Mandibular Tumour, courtesy of Morpho Vet Imaging, Belgium). These will be shared under a Creative Commons licence as Open Educational Resources meaning that they will be freely available. The intention is to categorise all these items in a way that they can be virtually displayed in “collections” and “themes” depending on where in the curriculum they will be used. The project has funding for each of the partner schools to employ students as virtual curators to help tag and build these collections.
PublishOER - Developing new models for Online Publishing
This project is led by the Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry & Veterinary Medicine at the University of Newcastle and will develop new ways of augmenting the open educational resources (OER) ‘pool’ with high quality published content by investigating new business models for embedding published works in OER. It is a partnership of organisations including Elsevier, JISC Collections, Rightscom (with links to all publishers) and education providers particularly the RVC. It will survey stakeholders in the context of advancing academic publishing in challenging times (responding to changes in UK further and higher education), test models of working through a significant case study in veterinary medicine and explore the potential for mutually beneficial national licence agreements. It will investigate alternative, flexible ways of raising income while augmenting existing resources with weblogs, reviews, comments and ratings from users, and ways of incorporating published works into OER, ensuring staff and students are operating within best practice, accrediting, attributing and paying (when necessary) for using commercially published material in sharable resources.
