College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
MEDICAL OER’s and OPEN TEXTBOOKS
Developing Open Educational Resources for Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health Education
The cost of developing medical education resources can be quite high and is duplicated across institutions. Enabling national and global access to medical open educational resources (OERs), including open textbooks, has the potential for improving health education and delivery, reducing cost for development, and expanding access to instructional content. After discussions with other repository providers and Florida State University College of Medicine (FSU COM), it is clear that there is an interest in setting up a meeting to discuss the creation of a sustainable OER partnership among medical schools, institutions providing healthcare programs (i.e., 2 and 4 year institutions), and repository providers.
The Orange Grove Repository and the Open Access Textbooks project has offered to facilitate this meeting with the assistance of FSU COM. The first step is to see what our common interests and goals would be. Please complete the Contact Information Form and the Meeting Time Poll if you are interested in participating in an online discussion about a sustainable OER partnership between accredited medical and healthcare educational institutions/programs. If there is indeed a group that is interested in collaborating on medical OERs, taking it one step forward and forming a medical OER consortium would not only provide institutions with a means for sharing and collaborating on medical OERs and reduce the cost of curriculum development but could also lead to the acceptance of medical OERs in promotion and tenure reviews. The FSU College of Medicine Open Educational Resources Task Force Final Report may be helpful to your medical community in understanding medical OERs.
Using the information you provide, The Orange Grove will work with the FSU Medical School to create the agenda and email it to you as soon as we determine the best time for our first meeting. We would like to schedule this meeting before the winter holidays.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Robin Donaldson, Ph.D
Project Director, Open Access Textbook Project
Project Manager, The Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
http://rdonaldson.com
rdonaldson@distancelearn.org
David W. Nelson
Project Manager, Open Access Textbook Project
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
dnelson@distancelearn.org
The Open Access Textbook project is supported by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE Grant No. P116Y090040).
Invitation: Let us ask your students, faculty, and administrators about OER
The Florida Distance Learning Consortium will administer two surveys. One is for college and university students on textbooks, open textbooks, and OpenCourseWare (OCW). The other survey is for faculty and administrators on digital textbooks, open textbooks, open educational resources (OERs), and OCW. These will be administered to all of Florida’s 28 public colleges and 11 state universities. This is our second round of these surveys, and we used the data from the first round (download the student survey report) to improve the items for this round.
We would be pleased to administer the same survey to other states, countries, or institutions so our community could gain a global, national, and state understanding of the awareness and use of OERs and OCW. In the interest of openness and free sharing of research data, we would make the raw data available for other researchers, as well as the analysis of the aggregated data for a national or worldwide perspective. Participating institutions would be provided with their raw data and our analysis methodology. Our goal is to administer these surveys annually, worldwide.
We are currently working on the process for making the surveys available to other institutions. To
accommodate the schedules of various institutions and our grant deadlines, our goal is to enable other institutions to administer the surveys as early as December 2011 and as late as the end of March 2012. The surveys are part of our Open Access Textbook project, supported by the Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), to develop a national model for open access textbooks with the eventual goal of making open textbooks available for the 50 most attended general education courses. We are working with the University Press of Florida and an international group of over 20 university presses toward that goal. Institution representatives who would like to take part in these surveys or interested university presses are welcome to contact us.
David W. Nelson is the Project Manager (dnelson@distancelearn.org) and I, Robin Donaldson (rdonaldson@distancelearn.org) am the Project Director. We look forward to working with
anyone who wants to take us up on our offer to administer the surveys.
Robin Donaldson, Ph.D
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
http://rdonaldson.com
The Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository
http://florida.theorangegrove.org/
Recent Comments