JISC

Introduction

This collaborative project will develop and evaluate processes to achieve sustainable use of RLOs by practitioners across medicine and related disciplines in the HE and FE sectors. It will build on existing and emerging experience and expertise in both the HE and FE medicine and health science communities to deliver mechanisms for effective repurposing of existing digital resources. 

The project recognises that although enhancement of student learning is the major focus, this can be best-achieved through persuading teachers to embrace technology (existing digital resources and delivery mechanisms) and embed it into their practice. Central to this is making this process easier, less time consuming, intellectually satisfying and rewarding through positive student feedback. Developing much more useful, teacher-centred, descriptors of RLOs and ensuring they are readily available is essential This will be achieved, in part by further developing existing, JISC-funded databases and dynamic uptake technologies to explore, with practitioners, innovative ways in which RLOs can be

(a) described using basic and extended metadata and educational and subject relevant taxonomies and

(b) catalogued to make them more useful in a wide variety of applications and scenarios

(c) readily accessed and aggregated into learning activities. 

Recognising that facilitating identification, selection and access is only part of the task to ensuring that the use of RLOs is embedded into practice and used to enhance student learning, the project will also involve teachers in the development of wrap-arounds to facilitate this process in ways appropriate to their local needs. Making this process easier, less time consuming, intellectually satisfying and rewarding is a major objective of the ACETS project. 

The process and effectiveness of using the repurposed RLOs in a variety of student learning activities will be evaluated with student groups and the results of this evaluation will be documented as further reflective guides to practice and use. The derived exemplars, which themselves will become new RLOs, will be catalogued and shared with the wider community where the transferability of the process can be investigated further. 

Aims and Objectives

1. Create a project infrastructure including a web-based file server, a web-site with online tools to support the project s learning community such as discussion boards and group workspaces.
2. Work with teachers to identify a varied set of existing RLOs appropriate for teaching anatomy and medical-related communication skills. These will cover different interaction levels, media types and levels of aggregation and will comprise a minimum of 100 learning objects which might include: peer reviewed courseware packages; text; images; video, and a minimum of 25 learning objects which might include: animations; audio; simulations; 3D models.
3. Develop a method for cataloguing the RLOs and describing them by developing a controlled vocabulary and metadata schema to enable relevant, teacher-centred descriptors (metadata) to be added.
4. Investigate ways of modifying existing JISC-funded databases (e.g. BIOME) and resource discovery technologies to make these RLOs more accessible both at their semantic and technical levels to teachers in both the HE and FE sectors.
5. Investigate methods of repurposing the identified RLOs to enable them to be embedded into a range of educational practices across the HE and FE sectors i.e. explore how the re-purposed RLOs can support student learning activities in a variety of contexts and for a variety of types of learning outcome.
6. Work with teachers to develop exemplars of learning activities based on using repurposed RLOs.
7. Work with teachers to produce an extensive and representative series of exemplar wrap arounds to ensure the learning activities meet local learning outcomes and are embedded into educational practice.
8. Evaluate the development processes and the quality and usefulness of the exemplars outlined above, and the internal management processes.
9. Explore how a limited set of RLOs can support teaching and learning in related disciplines such as veterinary medicine, dentistry, nursing, biomedical science and more distantly related topics such as beauty therapy and health studies.
10. Document the outcomes of the project and disseminate these to the wider HE and FE communities.