eLearning partnership for medicine

The Universities' Collaboration in eLearning (UCEL) was founded in March 2002. It is led by Cambridge in partnership with the medical and nursing schools of four universities: Nottingham, Manchester, East Anglia and Wolverhampton. UCEL has recently completed a successful six-month pilot stage. The collaboration is now set to roll-out nationally, aiming to establish itself as the leading provider of interactive education resources for doctors, nurses and other professions allied to medicine.

Economics is one reason for the collaborative approach. The cost of creating such resources is often too costly for individual universities but their generic nature means they can be used, re-used and shared between institutions.

Sharing of such resources is made easier because they are designed to be flexible. In the past computer-based learning has tended to be based on large stand-alone courses, which were difficult to incorporate into teaching. Now there is a general move towards flexible packages of discrete components, called reusable learning objects (RLO).

Learners and teachers alike have access to these resources at any time or place through a standard web-browser. Teachers can combine various RLOs to form the basis for their own custom-made courses or they can direct learners to individual RLOs to support or explain a particular concept or process. Material can be kept up to date more readily: it's much easier to update a single resource than an entire course.

Such flexible resources are designed as a supplement to rather than a substitute for traditional teaching: "You can't replace face-to-face," says Dawn Leeder, founder of UCEL and Senior Research Associate in eLearning at Cambridge Clinical School. "UCEL's core business is to create content to enhance traditional teaching, not to replace it."

UCEL has identified three areas where RLOs have maximum effectiveness and reusability: research skills, statistics and epidemiology. Proficiency in these subject areas is central to the effective practice of evidence-based medicine and is therefore a requirement for all healthcare professionals.

The UCEL model is truly collective: lecturers from each of the partner institutions providing expert knowledge which is then transformed into multimedia by content developers from across the partnership. The collective is administered from its Cambridge hub, located in the Media Studio of the Cambridge Clinical School, where researchers, medical illustrators, photographers, sound engineers and technicians turn imagination into reality and reify the lecturers' material into collections of still and moving images, and texts and spoken words, presented in charts, spreadsheets, simulations and other formats.

The resulting ingredients are then electronically despatched to a selected developer whose specialist skills are matched to the content of the package. Distributed production as well as creation engenders a collective sense of ownership that increases uptake, adding further value to these resources. The model is evolutionary, with continuous evaluation feeding back into the development process.

"This collective approach has been received with great enthusiasm," says Dawn Leeder. "It has struck a deep chord. It's timely, joined-up and it works. People really connect with it."

UCEL's national roll-out phase commences early in 2003 and institutions offering courses for healthcare professionals are invited to join the collaboration. UCEL offers full training and support for its collaborating staff.

Photo caption:
From left to right: Richard Powell (Homerton School of Health Studies), Simon Walker (University of Greenwich), Dawn Leeder (University of Cambridge and Director of UCEL), Vanessa Taylor (Homerton School of Health Studies)

Photo credit: Cat O'Malley