OER1067 Oral Presentation ppt

Can open educational resources meet the needs of national educational initiatives?

Kerry Welch, Chris Craggs, Richard Windle, Heather Wharrad, University of Nottingham

Conference Theme: Open Educational Communities

Abstract: In common with many areas of vocational education, nurse education has to respond to national initiatives and policies. In 2007, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for England and Wales introduced a series of essential skills, for nursing students (1) that all schools of nursing had to comply with from September 2008. Previously, Reusable Learning Objects (RLO) have proved to be an effective method of addressing core nursing concepts, as they engage the student in an active, personalised learning process. Therefore, we have commenced the development of a series of RLOs which have sought to address the NMC essential skills cluster requirements. As the resources developed for this project are funded by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Reusable Learning Objects, they will be open educational resources (OER). However, as the NMC essential skills cluster assessments are a national initiative, all nursing schools will be required to adopt or develop resources in these areas. This imperative has provided us with an opportunity to investigate the evolution of OER in response to a specific educational need. Firstly, we are investigating the potential of our OERs for reuse in other institutions. Colleagues from a range of institutions and clinical settings have been asked to peer review the resources and to comment on whether they would be useful for them, whether they would use them and what changes they would prefer or need to see. Secondly, we are investigating the macro development of resources in this area, the level of duplication and the balance between OER versus closed educational resources. A questionnaire has been developed and circulated to Schools of Nursing within the UK. It asks what electronic resources individual institutions are using to address the initiative outlined above, whether they are intending to develop resources, whether these will be made available as OER and whether they would be interested in using already prepared OER’s to address the requirements of this NMC initiative? Here we present an analysis of the OER designs created for this project, and the results from the peer review and resource surveys outlined above.

Keywords: Reusable Learning Objects Reuse Health Essential Skills Sharing

References:
Childs,L,L., Coles,L., Marjoram,B. (Eds) (2009) Essential Skills Clusters for Nurses. Theory for Practice. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). (2006) NMC Circular 35/2006. [online] Available at: http://www.nmc-uk.org/aDisplayDocument.aspx?documentID=2286 [Accessed on 11th November 2009]