#326 Poster/Demo

Monday 16 April 15:30 - 15:45 Armitage Room

OER Creation and Collaboration: What difference can open technology make?

Susan Albright & Mary Y Lee, Tufts University, US

Conference Theme: Innovation

Summary: TUSK is now open source - an enterprise software particularly for health sciences institutions, collaborative global networks

Abstract: Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) is a powerful enterprise educational knowledge management system suited for institutions with longitudinal, integrated health sciences curricula that require competency‐based learning, teaching and assessment. TUSK also provides tools to publish content to Tufts Opencourseware (http://ocw.tufts.edu) which provides health sciences content to the world’s teachers and learners.
Tufts University School of Medicine created TUSK in the late 1990s and has been developing and sharing this technology since 2000.  Currently, five US medical schools have TUSK, two schools in India, and a growing number of schools in Africa including in Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kenya. Rwanda, Ethiopia will soon follow, with plans underway for several institutions in Southeast Asia.  TUSK’s release date as open source software is March 2012 (http://opentusk.org).
TUSK is being used as a platform for curriculum co-development and global sharing across institutions. An export-import tool allows easy movement of content across institutions.  In recent years, we collaborated with our Indian partners at Christian Medical College Vellore to make TUSK tools and content available through mobile phones. With full mobile access, TUSK facilitates collaboration and training of students, volunteers and staff in the field to build capacity in rural locations where collaboration and communication is typically quite difficult.
TUSK itself is comprehensive, but a forthcoming application programming interface will enable other tools to easily connect with it. In resource poor areas with scarce IT professionals, TUSK provides a broad constellation of services that are basic to health sciences training – including the provision of course content and course management, tools to create Virtual Patients to train students in clinical decision making in a safe environment, administrative tools for course and student evaluation, and tools to track experiences in clinical settings. For institutions without technical support, future hosted services in “clouds” are being considered.
Course content developed at Tufts University has been published through TUSK to our OpenCourseWare site. But this is not the only way to share content. Any type of content can be developed at one institution and then exported to another for local customization. Creating high quality content is time consuming, including creating good virtual patients. TUSK’s Virtual Patient (VP) tool was created according to the international MedBiquitous standard for VPs that facilitates sharing across institutions (http://medbiquitous.org/working_groups/virtual_patient/index.html) as well as enabling adaptation to local curricular needs.  

Now that TUSK is open source, together we can build and shape TUSK to encourage the development of OERs, as faculty, as institutions, and as a global network.  TUSK can open up the world of training to more students in rural locations, particularly those who have internet access only through cell devices.  At the same time, institutions can have a powerful tool to manage their own curricula across dozens of programs within a complex university or across a national or regional network. Please join a growing global community of users to help develop our next innovative open tools to support teaching and lear