Description
In a medical curriculum innovation, one of the wishes was to use more OERs in the context of self directed learning. However, teachers were experiencing barriers in finding OERs and judging the quality – and also they simply do not have enough time to search and curate. Last but not least teachers had difficulties to (re-)design effective educational materials with reuse of OERs.
The OER jungle hides a high number of repositories and websites where OERs in many formats are disclosed in many different ways. The university decided to support the teachers with new content curation services (Kuipers, 2012; Kanter, 2012) and educational design services to overcome barriers, reuse OERs and move on to creating Open Educational Practices. This called for new roles for the library (von Neumann, 2014; van Wijngaarden & Vernimmen, 2015) and educational expertise center.
A grand total of 14000 medical OERs has been curated using inclusion and exclusion criteria. The first curation round with 3rd and 4th year student assistants took 700 hours. In the end 19% of the curated resources met the criteria, the rest was rejected. Reports for medical specialisms (like cardiology of neurology) were created, each containing between 20 to 130 items. A number teachers could easily crunch in the second curation round.
Content Curation results are now stored in a database and are opened up for teachers using a website with search and reporting facilities.
Next step was to support teachers reusing OERs and creating Open Educational Practices. New services for OER have been set up. The university library will be focalizing the curation process and copyright support. The educational consultants will guide teachers through the redesign and implementation process.
The presentation will elaborate on the content curation process and provide a deeper look into the database: database analysis results are quite surprising regarding low Creative Commons usage, (in-)completeness and low usability of the metadata, and characteristics of the curated items (e.g. high percentage of multimedia usage, many open textbooks, culturally difficult to translate). The website functionality and first user experiences will be discussed. Finally, the transition from the teacher’s intention to reuse to a well designed educational practice will be evaluated; this turns out to be a slow and time consuming process.
Because other university medical centers are interested to start using the facilities and locally implement similar support services, a national project is now in progress. The presentation will explain the approach that was chosen.
Kuipers, E. (2012) Content curation–a new way of monitoring the „Truth “. In: trend report open education 2012, Utrecht SURF.
Kanter, B. (2012) Content curation primer. Beth’s blog, http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/
Von Neumann, J. (2014) Open Educational Resources (OER): Neue Herausforderungen für Bibliotheken. OERSYS blog, Open Educational Resources from a Systems Thinking Point of View
van Wijngaarden, H; Vernimmen, F.(2015) Where is the Dutch OER librarian? In: trend repoert open education, Utrecht, SURF.