Friday 1 July 2011

WikiVet - A New Model For Sharing OER

E-Health Conference 2011 Report


Speaker: Nick Short, Head of eMedia Unit at the Royal Veterinary College, London
During this session, Nick Short, from the Royal Veterinary College in London talked about WikiVet, a comprehensive OER resource for vets.
As Nick explains, WikiVet was established in 2007 using the Wiki framework to allow online collaboration and store resources. “Uploading into a repository can be clunky, and we wanted to avoid duplication,” he explains.
There was mixed funding, from the HEA, JISC, even the Donkey Sanctuary! A lot of people came in to fund this project,” he says. And now the site has grown to include over 4000 pages of information. “All the content is authored by student and recent graduates, and the web orientated content is accessibile via the web and mobile phone interfaces,” he adds.
It’s huge! And it’s indexed in a very intelligent way,” he says. “There’s a lot of different ways to access the content. The key think is to make the information easy to find for our target audience.
With 11,000 registered users and an average of 50 new users joining per day, the success of this project is clear.
All the content is OER compliant, and there are translations, with students translating the content,” he says. “It’s an international resource and we have international partners. Everybody seems to want to get involved.”
After the obvious success of the WikiVet resource, Nick feels that wider questions now need to be answered. “Do we really need an international audience? I don’t know the answer to this. And the issue of commercial partnership is also an interesting challenge. For example, would we be comfortable having Big Pharma involved?”
Ultimately, these issues raise the question – can OERs have a commercial value. “It’s great to share, but can we ever sell them?” he concludes.

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