From: <abstracts@gsm

PRE-WORKSHOP

Open E-learning: strategies for cooperative cross-linked developments

S Hoehne, P Langkafel, R R Schumann

CharitÈ university medicine, project Meducase, Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene, Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT:

Aim of Presentation:

Content is king within every e-learning arrangement and context is the queen: The acceptance and sustainability of virtual learning environments increases with the quality and quantity of media, same as with the variety of resources that may be accessed by the user. An international network of distributed quality controlled e-learning objects accessible by each medical student or teacher would be an ideal e-learning environment for academic medical education. A huge amount of medical learning objects has been created over the last years, but access to most of them is limited by copyright restriction and commercial interest. As a result media must be reproduced each time for the same purpose in medical education. This is not only cost-intensive; due to its redundant nature it is simply a waste of creativity, knowledge and money. Electronic media is known as quite expensive in production, but the break even in amortization of the production costs of e-learning objects is dependent on the numbers of users. This presentation and workshop is aimed to pinpoint ways for an open academic e-learning network and to discuss the possible solutions with the participants.

Summary of Work:

The project Meducase, financed by the German federal department of education and re-search since 2001, is aimed at establishing an e-learning environment for students and teachers of medicine and dentistry. From the very first, Meducase enables open source licenses as the limited general public license (LGPL)(1) for its software developments. As a result, the main software engine of the projects developments, the content-management system Webman, is already published using the open source provider sourceforge (2). Other developments, i.e. a media-database, will follow until all technologies necessary to operate the system are completely open source licensed and published.

According to Jaeger & Metzger (3 )open content licenses are a determining factor for the sustainability of e-learning projects. We share this opinion and have published all media under a license similar to open content (4).

Moreover we have calculated a ratio for the amortization of e-learning objects that allows for a cost-benefit analysis. Based on this we are able to present an alternative to traditional ways to market knowledge, it is called open e-learning.

(1) http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.php

(2) http://sourceforge.net/projects/webman-cms/

(3) Jaeger/Metzger Open Content License nach deutschem Rechtì, MMR 2003 Heft 7

(4) http://new.creativecommons.org/licenses/nc/1.0/legalcode

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION: Open content in medicine: A strategy for sustainability?

The aim of this presentation and workshop is

· to provide information about “open content”

· to demonstrate concrete models of cooperative developments - especially in the field of academic e-learning networks in medicine

· to discuss the legal, technical and organisational pros and cons of the concept.

E-learning opens new perspectives, even after the breakdown of the "new economy hype". Whereas knowledge transfer and distributed access to scientific resources embodied the foundation spirit of the Internet, in e-learning developments copyright restrictions often limit the use of this key asset. But there are ways to enhance information access from the commercial private form to the open public form, and this may implicate a democratization of knowledge. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1) and the HEAL (2) project are precursors in this field: networked medical e-learning environments could be the next step. We would like to share with you our expertise of three years experience with open source developments and open content licenses within the Meducase project.

(1) http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

(2) http://www.healcentral.org/index.htm

Stefan Hoehne

CharitÈ university medicine

Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene,

Dorotheenstraﬂe 96,

10117 Berlin

Germany

Phone: 0049 (0)30 450 524243

Fax: 0049 (0)30 450 524149

mailto:stefan.hoehne@charite.de

Website: http://www.meducase.de/