2 Nov 2010
This year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication that first described the medical condition Sickle Cell Anaemia. To coincide with this anniversary it gives me great pleasure to introduce SCOOTER, an open education project from De Montfort University, Leicester UK.
SCOOTER stands for “Sickle Cell Open – Online Topics and Educational Resources”. SCOOTER is funded by the UK Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) , and both the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) are working in partnership to develop the HEFCE “Open Educational Resources” (OER) programme, supporting UK higher education institutions in sharing their teaching and learning resources freely online across the world.
Building on the work of a pilot which took place between April 2009 and March 2010, a second phase of projects and activities is now running until August 2011, of which SCOOTER is one of several projects. This phase will extend the range of materials openly available, and SCOOTER will produce educational resources on the topics of Sickle Cell Anaemia and Thalassemia, also known as Cooley’s disease in the US.
What will happen next?
I’m Dr Vivien Rolfe the Project Leader, and along with Professor Simon Dyson and Dr Mark Fowler, and a growing team of De Montfort University staff, over the course of the year we will be releasing onto this website educational materials including photographs, laboratory data, slide presentations, videos and animations. We will be explaining how to produce open content, and how to licence material for use, such as using the Creative Commons licences associated with the pictures above.
Would you like to be involved?
Do you have materials or ideas for a resource?
Do you want to follow the progress of the SCOOTER project?
Do you want to be involved in testing out new resources?
If the answer is YES, then we would be delighted if you could email us DMUSCOOTER@gmail.com and we will include you on our mailing list of already 200 researchers, health professionals, employers and education providers all working in the areas of Sickle Cell Anaemia and Thalassemia around the world.
