OER Phase 2 ACTOR - institutional change
Bristol University
As a previous partner in the OOER project, Bristol was responsible for the ‘Consent Section’ workpackage of the risk-kit. The risk-kit has since been modified for ease of use and Bristol will continue to use it for future material development.
Jane Williams, continues to contribute to the work on 'consent' and (along with
MEDEV) has proposed a ‘Consent Commons’: a new licensing framework to compliment Creative Commons. This would clarify the permissions given for using and reusing clinical and non-clinical digital recordings of people (patients and non-patients) for educational purposes. She has also been project lead on the Reusing Clinical Recordings Task Force, whose work on a set of generic principles and practical guidance has been incorporated into the toolkit. Work is continuing in this area.
Stephen Greenwood, has been instrumental in the amount of dissemination created for this project. He has presented at various conferences and meetings, e.g. the Academy of Medical Educators (AoME) Conference, Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) and also submitted a successful workshop abstract for presentation of the ACTOR project to the Association of Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference which took place in Vienna, August 2011.
Bristol got involved with the ACTOR project because they wanted to influence how OER are used within clinical education. During both ACTOR workshops, they presented their institutional progress to attendees and actively engaged with other PG Cert Leads to make the workshop(s) a success. Bristol also hosted the second ACTOR workshop.
Cambridge University
Cambridge hoped the project would help them inform the development of PG courses for tutors as they had approximately 150 GPs dispersed across the East of England involved in teaching. Access to OER resources would be useful to ensure consistency across their teaching programme.
Their primary contribution to the project was to release some of their documentation for the HEA course, which might be useful for other people to develop similar courses. They also wanted to evaluate institutional policies to discover what could and could not be released.
The main outcome of the project in Cambridge has been to raise awareness of the issues behind OER and the need to evaluate licensing and copyright of materials. The team submitted a paper to their Clinical Dean about developing policy for open access and copyright of teaching materials. This led to the formation of a Copyright Licensing and Access Group to develop an institutional policy (which was quite vague and actually not known by anyone!). Cambridge intended to use the MEDEV risk-kit to evaluate and improve policies in line with current consent, IPR and copyright law.
Hull York Medical School
Hull York Medical School (HYMS) is jointly owned by the universities of Hull and York which made it an interesting case study when considering institutional policy and practice. Each university had it’s own policies and employee contracts and, depending on which institution employed particular staff, it was unclear who owned copyright and, consequently, if materials could be openly licensed.
HYMS liked the fact that the ACTOR project was focused on PG Certs and had a small number of partners which made the project more targeted. HYMS weren't sure if they might (or might not) be able to contribute. As they weren't sure whether they had appropriate policies in place, they hoped the project would provide the 'building blocks' as they wanted to be able to create openly licenced resources automatically.
As a regional medical school, HYMS had extra clinical sites where students were trained within hospitals and in GP surgeries. GP’s recorded consultations on small cameras (as part of their teaching) so the consent section of the toolkit had was instrumental in managing and maintaining records of these procedures.
HYMS partners also found the MEDEV risk-kit easy to use and would continue to use in future for policy implementation and creation of resources as they were re-writing their institutional policy based on the advice in the toolkit. New consent forms were used for all of their lecture capture materials and all media projects would follow the HYMS ‘Elearning Process Guide’. Thanks to institutional buy-in, everything they created ‘ticked the boxes’ for OER. HYMS have widely-advertised ‘take down’ policies in place, and also applied the consent/copyright/IPR model to a new internal system named “My Identity” (this would not be released as OER as it contained personal student data).
There was a definite ‘institutional’ change in culture since HYMS involvement with the project. During both ACTOR workshops, HYMS presented its institutional progress to attendees and actively encouraged other PG Cert Leads to become involved.
Newcastle University
The medical schools involved in the ACTOR project were effectively in competition with each other, but as an older institution with developed programmes, Newcastle’s School for Medical Sciences Education Development believed it would be beneficial to work with newer institutions, like HYMS for example. They wanted HYMS to look at Newcastle’s Masters in Clinical Education (MClinEd) resources to see how they interpreted them or had suggestions for delivery. The school became a partner in the ACTOR project to encourage them to think ‘institutionally’, i.e. to find out who else delivered eLearning at Newcastle, where to find out about policies at Newcastle, etc.
The partners found the risk-kit easy to use and would continue to use for future resource development. Time was an issue so they continued to engage with the community of practice because they found it valuable. They could see the relevance of OER for their programme and hoped it might stimulate them to 'think outside the box' about the things they could do.
The school decided to share resources from a 30 credit module entitled 'Special Interest' (SI). They contacted a previous student who did a particularly good job on his assignment and asked if they could use his submitted work as an example. They reported they found the risk-kit useful, and relatively intuitive. The first resource took a bit of time, but by the time the last one was entered, they found it a fast and easy process.
They were also curious whether OER was the future of teaching & learning or 'just a trend'. Laura Delgaty (MClinEd tutor) thought it might be of interest to obtain evaluations from a student perspective as they could argue that they were part the community. The eLearning module of the MClinEd, 2010-11, tasked the students (clinicians) to review several OER sites and explain why they found them useful (or not), and if they would continue to use these sites. Newcastle was interested in the student feedback as students would be accessing, and hopefully adding to, OER in some form in the future. Gaining feedback from users at this early stage would help guide them in how best to present and organise OER.
Other institutions involved with ACTOR:
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
At the time the ACTOR project commenced, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) was unable to commit as a partner and no funds had been made available to enable them. However their interest was considered important and a site visit would be arranged, if possible. It was agreed to treat the LSHTM as a full partner and they could choose which aspects of the project they were interested in.
LSHTM continually kept in touch with project progress. It was anticipated that the ACTOR project would grow so a process of establishing good practice in encouraging others to come on board would only benefit the sector.
Nottingham University, Medical Education Unit
A colleague within Nottingham University offered materials from an entire clinical (Masters) module for upload into the OER domain. Using the risk-kit, it was discovered that the materials contained many instances of copyright infringement and lack of consent. Using the toolkit and other tools such as Xpert, Flickr and Google’s advanced search, some items were easily replaced but others (such as copyrighted videos, images of specific parts of the brain, illustrations from books PET, scans, etc.) were not. The Project Manager worked with Nottingham to discover which artefacts could not be replaced and sought permission from copyright owners in order to release the materials as openly licensed resources.
ACTOR:
The ACTOR project partners recognised the need for institutional change and continue to influence colleagues with respect to copyright use, digital professionalism and risk assessment.
