Repurposing Existing Healthcare Assets to Share
The intention was to provide teachers with a fast and economic way of developing high quality educational course units, by repurposing existing materials, and to provide students with learning resources that would be consistent when progressing from FE to HE (a 'resource escalator' moving up the HE0, 1 and 2 levels).
Executive summary
St George’s, University of London, led a consortium of Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) partners in the Re-purposing Existing Health Assets to Share (REHASH) project. The aim of this project was to establish a model for the effective implementation of distributed e-learning in medicine and healthcare education in HE and FE by adapting existing large collections of high-quality health resources for different educational contexts. These re-purposed resources were specifically tailored to support student learning at several distinct educational levels including courses in FE which widen access to nursing, medicine and healthcare (HE0 level), and continue these resources through into HE undergraduate courses in medicine and nursing (HE1 and 2 levels).
The intention was to provide teachers with a fast and economic way of developing high quality educational course units, by repurposing existing materials, and to provide students with learning resources that would be consistent when progressing from FE to HE (a 'resource escalator' moving up the HE0, 1 and 2 levels). This ‘resource escalator from FE to HE was developed to address a lack of consistency in e-learning resources between HE and FE sectors and to promote confidence and commitment in learners moving from FE to HE.
In addition, the project explored with teachers and students the value of repurposing resources, the perceived quality of the output, and the extent to which other institutions and teachers would be willing to adopt resources which had been developed by other teachers.
The pilot study suggested that the resources:
- competed ergonomically and in quality with the existing rapid and efficient process used for assembly of teachers’ lessons
- were attractive to both teachers and students
- in many cases but not all, other students and teachers were willing to reuse the resources in potentially different contexts
- that dissemination strategies involving, a project website, Jorum, and particularly local and national presentations were critical to uptake of the resources
Evaluation studies demonstrated that there is genuine enthusiasm on the part of many teachers and most students in both FE and HE to utilise these resources, regardless of where they are made. However, it was also apparent that both teachers and students required easy access to resources, and some level of continuing encouragement or support to maintain momentum from one student intake to the next. Their commitment was insufficient to continue usage if there was any difficulty in access or usage. That is, there was a natural balance between effort to use and value of the resource. One example of this was that teachers had difficulties accessing the national repository Jorum and it was necessary to create our own website for both teachers and students, to view or download the resources.
There is evidence that the project will be to some extent self-sustaining beyond the life of the project, with for example additional external funds provided for dissemination through local sixth form colleges; there is also a growing acceptance that the internet is now offering students an increasingly wide range of easily available materials. In that context the value of the REHASH topics will be progressively diluted and to an even greater extent will the value of such resources in a repository which is less easily-accessed than the internet.