KERRY WELCHAND

DR RICHARD WINDLE

1067

Can open educational resources meet the needs of

national initiatives?

Background

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) introduced an initiative called Essential Skills Clusters (ESC) which aims to ensure that certain specific skills have been taught to newly qualified nurses.

From September 2008 all education institutions who deliver pre-registration nursing programmes must ensure that they include the teaching and assessment of all areas covered within the ESC strategy.

In response to the ESC strategy, we are developing some open educational resources (OER)to cover the main themes. These will be in the form of reusable learning objects(RLO)

Reusable Learning Objects

Small in size (5-15 minutes)

Focused on single learning goal

Uses a mix of media

Platform and content independent

Interactive – activities & self assessment

Driven by pedagogy/tutors

Designed with reuse in mind

Example: z track injection RLO

Example

Rationale

During the processes involved in developing the RLOs we started to question...

How many other institutions were doing the same thing?Could using OER supply a solution?

There are 72 universities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland thatprovide pre-registration nurse training

Research

Because the OER will be made freely available under a Creative Commons Licence they provide a natural source of experiment to allow us to investigate the extent to which these resources could or would be shared by other institutions and the barriers and drivers to their reuse.

Aims

i)To determine the ways in which different Schools of Nursing are addressing the ESC agenda in terms of the resources they are adopting and whether these resources are commercial, developed in-house or freely available.

ii) To determine the factors that have influenced the decisions made in i)

iii) To determine the factors that drive or hinder the uptake of the RLO format by different institutions.

Process

E-learning resources

Using existing material

Developing own resources

Using freely available resources

Using commercially available

Summary to date

E-learning has been used to address the ESCs

Only a small number have accessed OERs, preferring, in the main, to either use existing material or purchasing commercially available resources.

All of the respondents gave very positive feedback to the OER example shown.

So why aren’t OERs used more widely?

Although.......

Initial conclusions

Much more work is clearly required in exploring the context of the comments, particularly those relevant to cost and standards of materials.

OER vs. Commercial

Standards of the material were rated highly as a factor influencing choice with both.

Suggesting that OERs are viewed as poorer quality than bought resources.

However.....

The OER sampled was rated very highly in terms of overall quality and use.

So this may suggest that the significant barrier to OER use is knowing that OERs exist and being able to find them.

Possibly...the perception that something you pay for has got to be better than something that is free!

Any questions?

Thank you