Dr Vivien Rolfe BSc PhD PFHEA National Teaching Fellow
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5489-6194
Thank you!
A huge number of people have been involved in this HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource (OER) project, and you can find details of other projects on my main blog vivrolfe.com.
The SCOOTER Project – Sickle Cell Open – Online Topics and Educational Resources was a collaboration between many staff and students at De Montfort University, including teaching staff, library and professional service staff, external collaborators and of course our students. The projects were supported by Jisc, the Higher Education Academy, and a great network of OER folk across the UK. (#UKOER). Here are some of the key folk,
Professor Simon Dyson – Professor of Social Science
Dr Mark Fowler – Principal Lecturer in Forensic Science
Libor Hurt – MSc student at the time
Malgorzata Rekas – biomedical science student at the time
Marilena Ioannou – microbiology
Jacob Escott – arts student at the time now maker of things
About me!
I’m Dr Viv Rolfe and the Director of this and several other open educational resource websites supporting teaching in health and life sciences. I also lead the Virtual Analytical Laboratory (VAL) and the Biology Courses projects. All this work was created when I was at De Montfort University, and I now am based at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol.
Why open education?
These projects are part of a global open education movement that is OPENING up the doors to education, providing better access to learning and sustainable options through the repurposing and sharing of content. Open Educational Resource (called OER) come in all shapes and sizes from entire textbooks to video, photographs, animations and many more file types. My aim is always to share resources in many file types to enhance their accessibility and reuse.
So what is special about an OER?
So these are just normal teaching materials right? Nope. You might argue the web is stuffed full of educational materials, and that is true. But much of it is copyright restricted so we can’t use it how we might like. Many medical subjects relating to patients would require permissions to use. The beauty of OER is resources are shared using a Creative Commons Open License (see the ‘CC’ logo on the image above). In our projects we use the license terms CC BY – SA (BY means attribute us using our web link and SA means share alike and return your new version to the web in the spirit in which was shared). Our copyright information can be found on the privacy page.
Who is this website for?
- School children and college students considering going to university and would like a taster of some science topics and resources.
- University students studying health and life science subjects.
- Teachers, tutors and lecturers teaching biology and sciences who might want photographs, video, animation and stuff to reuse.
- Anyone interested in blood disorders or science in general.
