Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely available digital materials that can be used by teachers and learners (McGill et al, 2013; de los Arcos et al, 2014). OERs can be individual stand-alone resources, such as a video lecture, a podcast or an image. They can also be collections of digital material designed for learning purposes, examples include open textbooks, open courseware, quizzes, tutorials and complete educational courses (McGill et al, 2013; de los Arcos et al, 2014). An important feature of OERs is that their copyright licence has limited conditions. A typical open licence enables users to re-mix, re-purpose and re-distribute a resource without requesting permission but that the creator of the original work is acknowledged. OERs are now used widely throughout the world and have revolutionised education in developing countries (UNESCO 2002). OERs are also widely used in countries with well-established education systems, such as the USA and the UK. However, in the UK higher education system very few universities encourage their use as core learning materials. This is hard to understand given that many OERs are of very high quality, their formats provide improvements in learning, and they can stimulate innovations in pedagogy (Weller et al 2015).

There are several barriers to implementing OERs as part of the core learning materials in UK universities (Hassall and Lewis 2017). The main barriers include a lack of staff time and training and a lack of financial investment required to provide these. However, perhaps the greatest barrier to using OERs is a lack of awareness of how they can be used to improve the quality of teaching and learning. If teaching staff were aware of the benefits of OERs then the incentive to invest time and money to implement their use is likely to increase.

The aim of this project was to obtain evidence that OERs can improve the quality of student-learning in medical education. This was achieved by including a number of different OERs within the core learning material of an online MSc module in Clinical Sciences. The OERs included, video lectures, molecular and cellular animations, an eBook, a free app for asynchronous discussion, a lab web site and open access research papers. Students studied the module over 5 days in December 2020 and feedback was obtained using 2 surveys. The first was a faculty-implemented evaluation of the course and the teaching staff. The second survey focussed on individual resources and asked students a series of questions to quantify the quality and relevance of individual learning resources using the likert scale. Proprietary resources and OERs were evaluated. The final output of this project will be a video report to the Medical School’s senior management. This will include and analysis of the survey data and a demonstration of how OERs are used within the module. The conference presentation will describe the module and the key findings from the surveys as presented in the final video report. The potential impactof these findings on the development of a Medical School policy on the use of OERs will also be presented.

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