Case study 1

ID503 Malaria

School or Department

LSHTM

Institution(s) involved

LSHTM

Contact + Email

Dr Sara Atkinson (sara.atkinson@lshtm.ac.uk)

Lindsay Wood (lindsay.wood@ncl.ac.uk)

Date

3^rd March 2010

Tags

postgraduate, malaria, infectious diseases, copyright permissions, institutional collaboration, commercial relationships, institutional policy

1. What is the curriculum context of the resource or resource collection?

A postgraduate advanced module as part the MSc in Infectious Diseases. It consists of 100-150 hours of study on malaria (likely to be but not yet confirmed as 15 PG credits). The pre-requisites are an undergraduate science degree.

2. What were the aims and objectives of the resource or resource collection?

The module enables the student to understand the biology and pathology of malaria. Although the subject of numerous interventions and control programmes, malaria remains the major parasitic cause of morbidity and mortality world-wide. The reasons for the failure of past attempts at control and the prospects for future success will be examined.

3. How was the resource or resource collection implemented?

A CD ROM, 300 MB in size, containing text, images and quizzes.

4. What technologies and/or e-tools were needed to deliver this?

CD-ROM authoring software.

Visual Understanding Environment (http://vue.tufts.edu/) was used to construct decision tree maps for guidance package advice.

Open Labyrinth (http://sourceforge.net/projects/Open Labyrinth/) was used to create a online application to deliver the decision tree maps.

SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) was used to survey interested parties and collection data on their methods used in pedagogy and resource discovery.

JorumOpen (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ ) was used as a repository to which learning resources were uploaded to.

5. What guidance and/or support did you develop?

Preliminary Patient Consent guidance was followed. As this resource did not involve patient data no further actions were needed.

IPR/Copyright guidance was followed. It was determined that the resource had multiple sources of IPR derived from its many authors and their contractual status. This included School employees, clinicians, contract staff and students employed on a temporary contract. Some of these contracts date back 10 years or more and would be time consuming to locate. Resource authors will be contacted to see if there are any objections to open release.

In this institution the Library is a driver of copyright policy observance. A meeting was held with a representative from the Library who clarified the contractual copyright position of School employees and the location of a general IPR policy on the School website (http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/).

The IPR/Copyright guidance package highlighted some elements of the resource that required clarification. There were some unattributed images, probably from Flickr, where permission needed to be checked and attributed if required. There were some images attributed to websites, which it would be prudent to know the locations of permission request documentation that were made to the author.

Institutional Policy guidance was not available. There is no Institutional Policy on releasing resources as OER. Currently, within the School, there is a focus to raise the profile of the School and for self-promotion Also, historically the School has in its foundation philanthropic activities in promoting worldwide public health and education. Within this Institution, efforts have been made by the OOER project to develop a policy on releasing OER. Negotiating through internal processes (Learning and Teaching Policy Committees and Senior Management Team meetings) has proved to be a time consuming and slow procedure (but is at least moving). As yet an Institutional decision to allow resources to be made open has not been made. In this Institution, a further complication is the commercial relationship with the University of London International Programmes. This commercial relationship is used to market this resource collection, and the students are dual registered (although this has taken time) in both institutions). The contract governing this University of London International Programmes relationship is currently being re-negotiated, which adds a further complication to the release of OER.

Internationalisation guidance was not available.

Pedagogy/QA guidance preliminary guidance survey was completed with feedback on wording, appropriateness of questions and usability given. It was useful in that it raised the issue of re-branding and of web accessibility issues.

Resource Discovery/Re-use preliminary guidance survey was completed.

Resource Upload guidance will be followed when IPR issues have been clarified and an Institutional Policy (more examples of those used elsewhere are needed) has been established.

6. Uploading and hosting resources.

The resource was not uploaded as an OER due to Institutional Policy issues.

7. What are the key outcomes of the resource or resource collection?

A useful outcome is the discussion of what is valuable to the end user as an OER, in terms of the granularity of a resource. Is an entire module more useful as it represents a cohesive learning collection suitable for a student or a teacher developing new material with few resources? Or is a single resource element, which a teacher could use to supplement their own materials, more useful (After attending the Cambridge event I am more and more of the thinking that individual item within the module might be most useful)? Recent attendance at OER10 has lead the resource uploader to think that individual items within this module might be most useful.

8. What follow-up activity will be/has been carried out as a result of the resource or resource collection?

The IPR clarifications will be followed up to confirm image permission have been sought. If possible the contractual status of employees from 10 years ago will be checked, although this may prove too time consuming. All resource authors will be contacted by email to see if any object to their resources being made open. The process of gaining Institutional support to release a resource collection as OER will be tracked and the rate limiting step will be reported back.

9. What are the lessons learned from the resource or resource collection?

No personal risks are perceived to the content depositor. There may be Institutional risks if content is uploaded that a person or organisation objects to. The lack of control in re-branding of a resource released as an OER is also a potential risk.

The benefits of making a resource open are to drive quality of learning resources upwards. In being a partner in the OOER project there has been increased interaction with different people within the School to discuss the project and to develop novel internal procedures.

Advice for others would be to release content where possible with a license that does not unnecessarily restrict re-use and repurposing. The latter are important to developing countries that need be able to adapt resources to their own teaching and learning environment. Addition advice is to be aware of how much time is required for Institution Policies to be written or changed.