The Biology Courses Team Present at London and Cambridge Conferences
BiologyCourses.co.uk is a new website containing open educational resources and taster materials for learners and teachers involved in the subject of Biology and Biology Courses.
- (1888PressRelease) April 27, 2012 - A group of staff from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, have presented their research at two international conferences recently. The first at Imperial College in London on 12-13th April was the first UK STEM Conference organized by the Higher Education Academy, and on 16-18th April the team participated in OER12 held jointly with the Open CourseWare Consortium and the Open University-based SCORE group.
What is STEM? The UK Government is supporting a wide number of initiatives to support STEM education - science, technology, engineering and mathematics, in terms of inspiring young people to study science and to improve university education and graduate employment prospects. The team from De Montfort led by Dr Vivien Rolfe presented on their work to release open educational resources (OERs) in collaboration with external partners in the public and private sector. By working with local hospitals, biomedical science students gain access to better quality educational materials based on real-life patient case studies. All these materials are released as OER as part of De Montfort's participation in the global open education movement.
Why is open education important? Open education is a growing global move to share learning resources to open up the doors to education. The second conference at Cambridge University was co-organized with the Open CourseWare Consortium (OCW). This is a collaboration of education institutions from around the world with a joint purpose of sharing educational materials for the benefit of all. There were delegates from all around the globe including Indonesia, China and India. The team had four presentations and posters at the session talking about the importance of sharing life science educational resources. Dr Vivien Rolfe spoke about their approach to sharing OERs by using internet marketing techniques known as search engine optimization (SEO). All our OER are available on project websites and can all be searched for via Google.
Who funds the work? The team are science lecturers based in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at De Montfort University. Dr Viv Rolfe has secured three rounds of funding from the UK Open Educational Resource Programme run by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), so the team have been involved in open education for many years.
De Montfort has led the way in supporting life science subjects including laboratory skills training, sickle cell disease and blood disorders, and in the current project "Biology Courses" we are sharing resources on biomedical science, forensic science and midwifery. De Montfort is one of a number of universities across the UK involved in open education.
For additional information visit http://www.biologycourses.co.uk. To view the conference presentations visit Viv Rolfe on SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/viv_rolfe/. We share our presentations and educational materials using a Creative Commons license.
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