Thursday, April 20, 2006

A Higher Education e-learning initiative that is working, without UKeUniversities level funding. IVIMEDS has 34 international medical schools sharing content and production to produce a sophisticated set of e-learning learning resources. By all contributing a modest amount of money at the start, the schools get a big payback for relatively small investment. Professor Ron Harding, an expert in Medical Education, and Alan Langlands (ex-CEO of the NHS, now running University of Dundee) are behind the project. Five UK medical schools are busy producing content in five medical areas. This 'distributed production' model seems to be working. Recent evidence from Australia has shown that students using these resources score significantly higher than those who do not. Already international on scale, with academic credibility and a good production model, based on sharing, this could grow into something much bigger.

http://www.ivimeds.org/

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Donald,

Thanks for bringing IVIMEDS to our attention. It is indeed an impressive project. I'm writing to alert you briefly to another, initially small-scale, project emerging (almost) out of UK HE which is succeeding on an international scale.

The project is www.CancerNursing.org, developed by myself and a colleague from Warwick University outside of our day jobs with next to no finance. Our model of online learning is a simple one of stand-alone, totally flexible courses that are free to access to nurses and carers internationally. We work entirely virtually with teams of authors from across the world who write and review our material and we are a few learners shy of 10,00 registered learners in just over 3 years. The site now looks a little old and we're busily prettying it up in the background to prepare it to delilver more multimedia content and resources that are smaller in scale than full-blown courses. Another sister site - www.PalliativeNursing.org - will follow in the next year.

stuart [@] cancernursing dot org