About Elsie

Aims and objectives

The aim of this project is to develop a series of interactive and engaging web-based RLOs featuring video clips of case vignettes that will support the facilitation of IPL through PBL. The clips will be supported with text materials and the RLOs will be available on the IPL and UCeL websites for maximum visibility. The IPL website will be available to clinical educators in practice areas as well as to lecturers in the practice areas. The UCeL website serves a broader, distributed community of health professional education in addition to Cambridge (Nottingham, Manchester, UEA, Wolverhampton and Peninsula Medical School). The RLOs, clips and other materials will be developed to be shared and reused in many teaching and learning settings.

The development of these RLOs will enable the institutions to evaluate what is possible in the delivery in the IPL curriculum through this media and offer the foundation to further develop this line of delivery.

Background

Universities' Collaboration in eLearning (UCeL) is a multidisciplinary national HE collective creating, sharing and evaluating eLearning resources in the form of reusable learning objects (RLOs). It is pioneering methods of "unlocking content", that is, helping subject experts organise their materials into a format suitable for RLO development. It is also developing repositories of high-quality multimedia RLOs and their component parts. It has a robust and iterative development lifecycle. All UCeL processes, methods and documentation are open source and freely downloadable from the website. The UCeL framework for collaborative content creation (Leeder et al, 2003) has been adopted by other organisations such as the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education and UCeL is also supporting the JISC/LTSN Distributed eLearning programme by providing a suggested framework for this.

Homerton College, School of Health Studies and Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine have been developing a strategy for the implementation of Interprofessional Learning (IPL) in the pre-registration curricula. This strategy sets out to make a website available through which clinical educators can have access to materials that support Problem Based Learning (PBL) for the purpose of IPL. The website is already under construction.