OU Conf: Marion Hall – HSC resource bank

Marion Hall, Lecturer in Faculty of Health and Social Care..

Library of resources for use across HSC courses – SORRS project – Shared Online Resources Repository System.

Went live on 16 Jan 2008, HSC resource bank as standard Moodle course website – http://learn.open.ac.uk/site/HSCRB

Can be accessed by: all HSC students, ALs, and OU staff via autoregistration at http://learn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4443

It’s a meta course so permissions feed in automatically from all HSC courses.  Wanted to use ECM but that’s not available, so the database lives somewhere else as a workaround, so can’t genericise it until it’s available.  Could use it in other Faculties but would need to do your own workaround.

Metadata attached – especially ‘nation’ – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland – especially for legislation in H&SC contexts.  And keywords from a restricted taxonomy!  Thirty keywords – to help with students putting in mis-spellings, or the synonyms problem.  (Hmm – I think there are cleaner ways of doing this.)

Resources lifted from existing courses, genercised, converted for web.  About 300 resources (pages) at now; another 375 in Phase 2 in Sept 2008, mostly new resources from Jan 2009 from courses in production.

Another component – ‘Milestones’ – significant events in history of H&SC from 1869; each event is an individual resource, course teams can add events (e.g. when doing new course) – can produce search results as a timeline graphic.  (Fun timeline technologies from Tony – e.g. Simile timeline, also BBC have done some nice ones.)

Resources available via programme website; allows for systematic skills development within a named award.

Me – any feedback/evaluation?Marion – Main formal evaluation is to come after stage three. Some small tentative evaluation which gave us some info about study time for these resources.

s/o – What about the generic resources on S Svcs website and getting them to do the extra work>

Marion – Yes, we’ll use those where available, but our students need a lot of handholding compared to the Computing Guide – liaising with Student Services

s/o – Wanted a guide to using Word drawing tool, got the students to produce it, very successful.

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Author: dougclow

Data scientist, tutxor, project leader, researcher, analyst, teacher, developer, educational technologist, online learning expert, and manager. I particularly enjoy rapidly appraising new-to-me contexts, and mediating between highly technical specialisms and others, from ordinary users to senior management. After 20 years at the OU as an academic, I am now a self-employed consultant, building on my skills and experience in working with people, technology, data science, and artificial intelligence, in a wide range of contexts and industries.