Perceived Needs & Project Design
An initial meeting took place in January 2006 with Prof John Read. At this first meeting, however, it was difficult to ascertain how the Medical School and the pre-clinical medical degree course in particular could be supported. The course was in very early phases of development. Only in June did a role for the IADP begin to take shape and this occurred primarily because two new appointments, Dr. George Mokone and Dr John Wright, were tasked with the collection of teaching materials for the new course.
An existing relationship with Books Botswana and University of Botswana which the Medical team preferred to exploit meant that the IADP’s role was not to source e-books but rather to determine the existence of supplementary OER to support the following 1st and 2nd year topics: Growth Reproduction and Endocrine, Musculo-skeletal, Central Nervous System, Psychological Health, Haematology/Immunology, General Pathology, Infection, Renal and the Cardio Vascular System.
It was anticipated that these resources would help both students and staff when interacting with the Problem Based Learning (PBL) methodology that was to be used throughout the 1st and 2nd year courses.
Pilot Implementation & Processes
A team of IADP searchers combed the public OER repositories and contacted OER Africa’s Health network to identify resources not yet available via the Internet. The intention was to collect as many digital resources as possible so that they could be distributed via a DVD eliminating the need for students to have reliable connectivity and good bandwidth. However, as there are a lot of quality medical OER materials out there it was decided to insert numerous links to the repositories as it would be impossible to create a truly comprehensive compact disk. The following repositories proved especially useful:
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MedEd Portal
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John Hopkin’s Bloomberg School of Public Health
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Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)
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Open.Michigan Medical School & School of Public Health
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Tufts Open Courseware School of Medicine
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MIT Health Sciences and Technology
A gigabyte of materials were accessed from the Internet, downloaded and stored on a DVD. These materials were categorised according to ‘Courses & Lecture Notes’, ‘Media (Images and animations)’ and ‘Online Journals’. A streamlined interface for the DVD was developed to help students and staff access the materials quickly. The introductory screen also introduces to the students the concepts of PBL and OER. There is also a brief explanation of the meanings of the Creative Commons licensing symbols.
On review Professor Read requested additional sub-categories be added to the collection under the heading, ‘Foundations of Medicine’. These included; Anatomy & Histology, Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Genetics Microbiology, Pathophysiology, Pharmacology and Physiology. This was duly completed and forty copies of the DVD were couriered to Gaborone for the start of the new course in July 2009.
Pilot Products & Outcomes
The DVD medical OER sampler was the main product that came out of this pilot. While it has been incorporated into the course materials of the 2009 intake of students for the pre-clinical medical course at UBMS it has already been distributed wider. OER Africa currently hosts an online version of the compact disk on their OER Health page and the University of Malawi, Kamuzu College of Nursing, has received a copy of the disk for distribution amongst their students.
Sample screen from the Medical OER Sampler DVD
The UBMS team was also integrated into the wider OER community. A representative was asked to attend the Health OER Conference in Cape Town organised by OER Africa and University of Michigan in July 2009. Professor John Read made a presentation about the scope and vision of the UBMS’s new pre-clinical medical course to OER practitioners from around Africa and the US. He also experienced reports on other OER initiatives.
Lesson Learned
The facilitator reports that numerous medical OER are available yet there has been no attempt to organise them systematically. OER Commons (www.oercommons.org), an OER directory, has a large number of medical resources listed but is by no means comprehensive. As OER users, both students and course designers, often complain that searching for OER is a monotonous, time consuming process, highly dependent on luck, there is a place for CD samplers. These collections streamline the acquisition of resources and allow practitioners to focus their energies on using the materials instead of searching. Another advantage is they hold the resources in electronic format. This is significant in Africa where poor connectivity is common. Sadly though they will date very quickly as and when new materials are published as OER and released on the Internet. The CDs, of course, remain static.