- Figure 1. Homepage of the OERC site.
Open educational Resources for Cancer (OERC): Two years of progress
OERC Rationale
The rapid rise in global cancer rates is well established as discussed in the President’s Message. By 2030 estimates from The International Agency for Research on Cancer indicate that in the absence of improved cancer control, the global burden of cancer could be as high as 17 million new cases per annum. Already, more than 50% of cancer cases and 70% of cancer deaths occur in developing countries.
Thus, a major challenge will be faced by nations with limited resources. Most evident at present are the deficiencies in human capital and material resources. There is a clear lack of potential for cancer control capacity development at both quantitative and qualitative levels, and it is generally agreed that human capital development - the expansion and education of the cancer workforce - is a critical factor in ensuring progress.
The need for education in cancer care was a major factor in the decision to develop OERC. At the same time it was evident that extensive cancer educational materials are continuously generated by teachers in universities, cancer institutes, professional organizations, national and international, and non-governmental, not-for-profit organizations. Many excellent didactic modules covering a broad range of cancer-related topics remained unpublished and inaccessible in the public domain. Thus it was proposed that learning modules of varying formats, but with a particular emphasis on topics relevant to low- and middle-income countries, be solicited, reviewed, classified and collected in an open resource repository accessible, via the Web, from anywhere in the world.
OERC - the First Two Years
In June of 2008, at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, 30 cancer educators and researchers from INCTR, NCI and various universities gathered for a day to enhance their understanding of the educational requirements to build capacity for cancer control in developing countries and to develop a mechanism for global sharing of cancer educational tools. A small, interdisciplinary working group of committed individuals (later to become the OERC Executive Committee) began to design an online repository of cancer education modules selected to aid educators in low-resource countries to develop curricula and teaching programs tailored to the specific needs of their learners and local environment. Materials were searched and solicited from a wide range of sources, in order to be made easily accessible via a Web Portal at no cost to medical teachers - anywhere and at any time. In 2009, a mission statement was formulated by the Executive Committee as follows:
- To enhance knowledge sharing among countries on cancer control strategies
- To expand the capacity of physicians, nurses and care givers in developing countries to treat cancer patients
- To make available cutting edge research information on cancer care in an easily accessible format at no cost on a worldwide scale
- To make available the latest clinical trials information to cancer care providers and patients
- To act on the current WHO recommendation for knowledge sharing and cancer control
- To contribute to the development of a research infrastructure and a research ethos for cancer prevention and care at a global level.
After a year of concerted effort, a formal relationship between OERC and INCTR was developed to begin to define the cancer educational needs of low-resource countries. Development of the educational repository proceeded by 1) a establishing cancer taxonomy outline and 2) soliciting, collecting, reviewing, and classifying educational materials, including PowerPoint presentations, course syllabi, monographs, clinical guidelines, videos, research summaries, patient education modules, links to other relevant sites, etc. It was decided that these materials would be made available via the Web Portal hosted by MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching), (www.merlot.org), the well-established and proven open resource application of the California State University System. Within MERLOT, a new “cancer education community” was established.
The OERC portal, oerc.merlot.org (see figure 1) was announced at the INCTR annual meeting in Antalya, Turkey, and launched online in July 2009. The OERC collection continues to expand, providing no-cost access to materials contributed by the global community of basic scientists and clinical cancer professionals that can be used for self-learning or in the creation of teaching modules relevant to the education and training of healthcare professionals and students, as well as patients, families and the public.
In building the collection of open educational resources, the OERC set goals of not only making materials in the collection available free of cost, but also freely usable. The Creative Commons© policy was selected to serve as the guide to intellectual property rights and explicitly grants users permission to use all or part of the selected materials with appropriate attribution. The OERC collection will be leveraging MERLOT’s strategy for providing users assurance of quality and utility. As OERC builds its collection and community of users, we will establish an editorial board for conducting peer reviews of the collection. MERLOT has an established methodology for peer reviewing materials that it has deployed for the past 10 years. This follows the peer review process of scholarly research (http://taste.merlot.org/peerreviewprocess.html). The methodology begins with training the peer reviewers on the three evaluation criteria used in the peer review process:
- quality of the content,
- pedagogical effectiveness, and
- ease of use.
The training provides peer reviewers the guidelines, practices, feedback, and mentoring to develop their skills in conducting valid and reliable peer reviews. MERLOT’s peer reviews are published along with other information about the quality and utility of the resource. The provision of analysis and advice by the larger OERC community can help individual users decide if and how the materials can be used effectively in their local context. Furthermore, MERLOT enables individual users to add their advice and experiences about how they were able to use the resource in their local situations and add their observations of outcomes. By using the existing and well-tried methods of MERLOT, OERC enables the community of users, experts and educational content providers to establish additional communication links, adding value to the materials themselves.
