Data
Increasingly, as research moves towards open access, so data is also being shared. As well as the UK Data Archive, there is also Wikidata. If you are interested in data that others have processed, you may find some useful resources in Figshare. One of the most visually appealing ways of presenting data is Hans Rosling’s Gapminder site.
Open data can be used as an open medical education resource. If you are interested in this, you may find this article on the use of Open Data for educating towards social cohesion helpful, as it offers some examples and a pedagogical background to this type of practice.
Twitter is a big source of data and of various resources that can be used and re-purposed as open education resources. Think about those that are shared daily under the #FOAMed hashtag or, more specifically, the #FOAMped, #FOAMrad and #FOAMgp, amongst others…
Blogs are also a rich open education resource. For example Life in the Fast Lane supports a global virtual learning community by in emergency medicine offering a wealth of resources by individuals for self-study or by medical educators in their teaching. There is no need to reinvent the wheel: an open education practitioner can critically select the best resources, aggregate them, enrich them with extra content and re-use them under their own educational objectives.
Audio – You may well be used to using podcasts for personal interest – for example, such as those that the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada offers on various Medical Education topics – but have you found any that are useful for your students? As well as videos, TEDTalks are also available as audio. Alternatively, Freesound gives you lots of different creative commons licensed sounds, and the Free Music Archive is just that, we’ve used Podington Bear’s collection with our students.
Video – For videos, as well as TED, Vimeo and YouTube, you might want to have a look at Videolectures.net – which has a vast database of lectures, not all in English. It covers lectures, conferences, tutorials, keynotes…
Photographs and images – Flickr is probably the most used site to share and find images or photographs to reuse. You can search photos under a particular CC licence that allows you to reuse them under certain conditions.
Presentations – Slideshare is to presentations what Flickr is for photographs. You can easily reuse content from Slideshare by using an embed code and share to social media channels.
Can you think of engaging ways you could use Audio, Video and other data as an Open Education Resource for Medical Education?
Starting from the resources we mentioned above, have a look around and find interesting material that could serve as OERs and post them in this Padlet Wall.
Next Activity – Managing and filing resources
Open Medical Education Practice 