African Health OER Network

     

IN THIS ISSUE
Latest OER
Help us find health OER to match requests from Ethiopia and South Africa
Post-Graduate students as OER Champions: Open as an opportunity for aspiring educators
Open access publishing in health sciences
Ear, Nose, and Throat surgery OER extend beyond University of Cape Town classrooms
African Health OER Network profiled in new COL/UNESCO book
Impact evaluation of the African Health OER Network

 

  LATEST NEWS
On 2 July, the Network convened the fourth Health OER Partners Forum teleconference.

From 20-22 June 2012, UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning facilitated a World OER Congress in honour of the ten-year anniversary of the concept of OER. Ted Hanss (University of Michigan) presented about the African Health OER Network at the Open Seminar & Exhibition which was organized in full partnership with OER Africa, a Saide initiative.


On 6 June, the Health OER Tech group gathered for their bimonthly audio conference.

In May 2012, Adam Rahman (KNUST) presented a poster about Health OER at an international Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics conference.



  FEATURED HEALTH OER COLLECTION
 

University of Nottingham School Of Nursing Educational Technology Group

The University of Nottingham School Of Nursing Educational Technology Group (SONET) has, since the 1990s, developed and openly shared health education resources within the school and more widely to others wanting to use these materials. The SONET website has a large repository of multimedia, interactive Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) developed collaboratively by teachers, health care professionals, and software developers.

The SONET RLOs are used all over the world, including in Africa, and an interactive map of locations where they are used shows that these resources are being used in universities, schools, and colleges. RLOs available include those in genetics, pharmacology, biological processes, healthcare, practice learning and clinical skills, anatomy, and midwifery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facilitators Logos

Latest OER

We have added the following materials to the Network website since April:


Help us find health OER to match requests from Ethiopia and South Africa

We have received new requests for existing OER to supplement health education. Please help us find relevant materials:

Post-Graduate students as OER Champions: Open as an opportunity for aspiring educators

Veronica Mitchell and Matumo Ramafikeng, postgraduate students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town, have been supporting teaching staff to develop OER, and they authored their own OER. In this guest article, they share their experiences as OER support staff and developers, a role where they encourage teaching staff and students to create and use OER.

In our role as OER support staff and developers, we create and promote OER within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town and beyond. It is a rewarding and inspiring task in which we feel supported by a team within the Education Development Unit led by Greg Doyle.

Our advocacy activities are driven by our philosophy of teaching, learning and research. We value collaborative efforts and seek ways to engage with others in the most effective and empowering manner. Our enthusiasm in advocating for openness stems from our common interest in sharing knowledge and developing partnerships. Perhaps arising from our backgrounds in Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy, we inherently act as facilitators towards a better outcome in a pragmatic way.

Recognizing the need to make learning more accessible by modifying the language in teaching material, Matumo has received an international OpenCourseWare (OCW) award for her teaching resource on the Occupation Focused Conceptual Framework. Her module was later translated into Spanish and published as a research publication in an open access journal. Veronica’s published resources have enabled her to share innovative teaching tools from her digital professionalism and health and human rights workshops to promote women’s health with the undergraduate medical students in years 3, 4 and 5. Open access publishing provides an accessible platform for newcomers in academia to demonstrate their work to others beyond the department and institution. 

Veronica’s published OER was recently included at the South African Health Educationalists' Association (SAAHE) conference. Participants expressed their appreciation at the sharing of resources, noting how unusual it was for them to gain open access to other academics’ teaching resources. Our publications have motivated us to delve more into teaching and research.

In our work promoting OER, we realize that transforming teaching and learning practices is a slow process, especially as personal philosophies and identities shape educators’ choices. We are digging deeper than traditional lecture delivery. Furthermore, incentives to publish in traditional credited journals are far greater than OER can offer at this stage and better contribute to established performance appraisals. Closed journals are regarded as more credible, consequently most people prefer to publish in these journals rather than the open access ones, which are not listed. For instance, a paper in the open access Occupational Therapy journal offers limited rewards within our institution. Yet, from a broader perspective it feels like academics are slowly warming up to the idea of OER.  It will take time and patience to shift established mindsets.


Open access publishing in health sciences

The guest article below was written by Ms. Lisbeth A. Levey, a Senior Adviser to the OER Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

In the May issue, we recommended that authors publish in open access journals in order to ensure that colleagues at their home institution and others around the world are able to access the articles.  In addition to ease of access, authors often consider the ‘citation index’ or ‘impact factor’ of a journal, that is, the number and collection of other scholarly articles that refer to a particular article or journal. University policies for promotion and tenure place high importance on the impact factor of faculty publications. Many of the most often cited health journals, e.g. the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Nature, and Science are all rights reserved and require expensive subscription fees.

However, researchers and instructors do not have to give up widespread access in order to publish in high impact journals. Cognizant of growing demand on the part of funders and researchers for open access and publicly accessible research, publishers of long-standing high impact journals have begun to compromise. Some journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, make their articles freely available after six months. Others, such as Nature and Lancet, offer authors an option to designate their articles as open access for a fee. Yet others, such as Science, will not allow visitors to download free copies of articles from the journal website, but they permit authors to mount copies of their articles in institutional repositories or personal websites. The publisher or the author continues to hold the copyright, even though the article is freely available.    

Why should you care about open access publishing? In many African universities, students, faculty, and researchers have free access to the highest cited biomedical sciences journals through a World Health Organization initiative called HINARI. The journals in the HINARI collection are all rights reserved and normally require hefty subscription fees. These journals are offered freely to universities in low-income countries through publisher agreements. Although HINARI does not require subscription fees, the agreements may not last forever and there may be other access restrictions (e.g. on-campus computers or IP addresses, prohibition of systematic or mass downloads, etc.). 

In order to ensure that your research reaches the widest possible audience worldwide, investigate your open access publishing options. You may, for example, be able to add a pre-print version to your institutional repositories or personal websites. Publishing policies differ by publisher, but many authors are not aware of the open access options available to them. Consult the publisher when you submit your article to understand their publishing policies. The University of Nottingham in the UK maintains an excellent site on publisher copyright and archiving policies.

Ear, Nose, and Throat surgery OER extend beyond University of Cape Town classrooms

Mr. Greg Doyle, educational technology manager, and Professor Johan Fagan, Head of the Division of Otolaryngology at the Faculty of Health Sciences at University of Cape Town, share an update about the worldwide access and visibility of instructional materials from the Division of Otolaryngology.

The Division of Otolaryngology has a long-standing training programme for Head and Neck surgeons across South Africa and in other African countries. This programme has created awareness of the difficulties that doctors in developing countries face in accessing surgical textbooks and educational material. For example, a new surgical textbook may cost a South African surgeon the equivalent of two months’ salary.

This realization prompted Prof Johan Fagan to create an Educational Website for ENT surgeons in the Developing World, which was licensed as an OER. Since the website was launched in November 2010, it has been visited over 7,000 times worldwide, with views in almost every country (Figure 1). The countries with the most users have been South Africa, India, the UK, the USA, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Nigeria, Italy, and Kenya. Nearly half of the visits to the website are repeat visits, and the average time per visit is over four minutes, which indicates that it is proving to be a useful resource.


Following failed negotiations with two big publishers to offer out-of-print textbooks as open access resources, Prof Fagan started writing The Open Access Atlas of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Operative Surgery. He recruited some of the top international sinus, ear, and head and neck surgeons as co-authors. Since the first few chapters were released in November 2011, chapters have been downloaded over 11,000 times, 1,100 of which were to mobile devices.
The popularity of these two OER demonstrates a means by which UCT can reach out and share information with academics and professional colleagues internationally.

 

African Health OER Network profiled in new COL/UNESCO book

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have just published a new book, Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education: Reflections from Practice. The book, with contributions from 28 authors, has case studies and reflections from diverse contexts, with a marked presence of contributions from developing countries.

The book features case studies and reflections from multiple members of the African Health OER Network institutional projects and other health education OER.

In their chapter  on “Producing OER from Scratch: The Case of Health Sciences at the University of Ghana (UG) and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST),” Kathleen Ludewig Omollo (University of Michigan), Adam Rahman (KNUST) and Chris Yebuah (UG) provide an overview of the processes and decisions that enabled these two institutions to produce and share good quality health resources that meet their needs and those of other institutions. Full accounts of the UG and KNUST OER development processes are highlighted in the 2010-11 case studies that were written to showcase these institutions’ achievements, challenges, and lessons learned about OER development.

In his vignette “OER and Teaching Occupational and Environmental Health at the Post- Graduate Level to Medical Practitioners at the University of Cape Town (UCT),” Prof Jonathan E. Myers describes how faculty involved in teaching the Postgraduate Diploma in Occupational Health embarked on a journey of converting materials for an eight week block release, face-to-face two-year programme into digitally available materials to support students sufficiently during their time away from the two week contact with lecturers. He emphasizes the lessons learned during the process.

In the chapter “Sharing Existing Teaching Materials as OER: Key Considerations from Practice” Monica Mawoyo and Neil Butcher (Saide)  draw from several institutional case studies - including the Health OER activities at UG and the UCT - to show how effective OER development practices have to take into consideration technical, pedagogical, and legal issues to guide OER production and sharing.

Collectively, the case studies in the book highlight effective models of practice harnessing OER for those who want to share their teaching resources with other practitioners. The cases demonstrate that institutions successfully integrated the OER creation process by working within their institutional constraints and capabilities to develop contextually relevant OER that are sharable with other institutions. This integration into the university practices promotes the viability of OER.

The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, is abound with lessons for others who want to explore OER.

Impact evaluation of the African Health OER Network

Since 2009, the African Health OER Network (the Network) has hired an independent evaluation consultant to conduct an annual project assessment.  The first evaluation in 2009 was a formative evaluation explored ‘take up’ and production of OER in partner institutions. The second evaluation was the 2010 – 2011 African Health OER Network Phase 2 Evaluation: Consolidation and Sustainability, which focused on exploring how OER practices were being consolidated to ensure their sustainability within the institutions. This year’s impact evaluation is the third evaluation conducted on Network activities since 2009.

While the first two evaluations focused only on the four partner institutions participating in the Network when it was founded (the Universities of Ghana, Cape Town, and the Western Cape, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), the impact evaluation focused more broadly on Network activities, including these four institutions and partnerships that have been formed since project inception in 2008, as well as broader usage of health OER by other users not affiliated with the Network. The evaluation considers OER impact in six key areas:

  • Is there evidence of use of Network developed OER by students and/or faculty in partner and non-partner institutions? Are partner institutions using OER developed elsewhere?
  • Is there evidence that OER is improving teaching and learning within partner institutions?
  • What are the relative financial implications of OER compared to proprietary approaches of publishing and content development, both in terms of delivering education in universities and in terms of producing educational resources?
  • What is the impact of OER on academics’ career development?
  • What is the effective social and technical institutional infrastructure to support OER production and use?
  • What is an effective cross-institutional collaboration model for OER production?

The evaluation is an analysis of web-derived statistics on usage, combined with interviews with students and staff at participating institutions, and documents and OER modules created by the institutions. Broadly, the evaluation concluded that:

  • In partner institutions, there is continued production of OER, as well as use of OER developed from elsewhere, with a strong but small pool of OER champions leading the development process. Uptake of OER has led to institutionalization of open educational practice through policies that endorse OER within the system, reward staff for OER production, and encourage students to be co-producers of OER. The OER developed by partner institutions are being used by students outside the Network, with the video materials proving to be highly popular. There are 804 individual ratings on quality for YouTube video OER from the Health OER Network.
  • Students and staff believe teaching and learning has improved because of OER.
  • Although it is difficult to make statistically derived conclusions about cost effectiveness of OER, perceptions of students and faculty are that, compared to the cost of textbooks, OER offer effective and cost effective alternatives.
  • There is good output of OER practice at international conferences and through publications. OER are making lecturers rethink the way they package their teaching materials and the way they teach.
  • The success of OER within participating institutions is because production of OER has been ‘consistent with the distinctive ethos, contextual realities, strategies and resources that characterise’ the institutions.
  • The Network has expanded, with new higher education institutions forming partnerships to collaborate in providing and sharing health resources.
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