Chapter 3: Sharing Educational Resources

Intended audience

Educators at CTSAs who want to build a community of learners around their educational material, or make their educational materials discoverable and usable by others.

Current version / status

Guidance

Actively Soliciting Comments and Feedback

Lessons learned / summary

  • An effective method of sharing your materials across CTSAs is through the CLIC Education Clearinghouse

  • Making educational resources discoverable requires publishing metadata about that resource

  • Consider making your resource an open educational resource (OER) by sharing the material openly

  • If your resource is an OER, make extra metadata available that emphasizes its reuse

  • Inviting other instructors and learners to utilize and update educational resources builds an educational community

  • Educational communities have multiple benefits beyond keeping course material up to date, including providing support for both beginner and intermediate learners

Why this is important

Keeping educational resources both discoverable and up to date is difficult for single CTSA sites.

Discoverability

Making an educational resource discoverable is of vital importance. Sites replicating educational material that already exists is ultimately a poor use of resources. Such replication largely ignores the possibility of building educational communities around such resources.

Discoverability may be done for multiple reasons:

  1. to advertise that an educational resource exists so others may take the course,

  2. whether a course is appropriate to reuse, repurpose, or remix, and has additional resources to aid other instructors in adopting the material.

Keeping Material Updated

One alternative to a single site maintaining an education resource is providing collective ownership to a learning community, such as the model for The Carpentries (Software, Data, and Library Carpentry), or the R for Data Science learning community. Hundreds, if not thousands of educators have tested, honed, and improved the lesson material for these groups. Collective ownership of the learning material makes the material stronger and more applicable to a wide range of learners. Additionally, the learning community that results from such collective ownership provides an opportunity for those with intermediate skills to improve their knowledge and practice this knowledge in a safe and supportive environment.

Status and feedback mechanisms

What stage is it in the development process? (See options below). Description and links for how people can comment, or contribute – whether via Google form or GitHub issue etc.

Takeaway List

  1. Submit your educational resource to the CLIC Educational Clearinghouse

  2. Consider making your resource an Open Educational Resource (OER)

  3. Make metadata available for an educational resource available by publishing metadata using a standard such as MIER or Harper Lite

  4. Add metadata that encourages reuse of your educational resource

  5. Encourage the formation of an educational community around an educational resource

  6. Foster growth and updates of your material through quarterly hackathons or sprints

Deep dive into takeaways

1. Submit your educational resource to the CLIC Educational Clearinghouse

2. Consider making your resource an Open Educational Resource

Making your educational resource open has many benefits.

3. Make metadata available for an educational resource by publishing metadata using a standard such as MIER or Harper Lite

At the very least, map your educational resource to the Clinical and Translational Science Competencies established by CLIC. Follow the trend in tags (keywords) that are commonly used.

In order for your resource to be discoverable, providing essential metadata using a standard such as MIER or Harper Lite is important.

4. Add metadata that encourages reuse of your educational resource

Both the MIER and Harper-lite metadata standards include metadata that are specific to reusing course material:

  1. What is the Licensing? Is the resource available to be repurposed by others?

For many instructors, if the licensing is too restrictive (such as requiring the No-Derivatives), instructors may be prevented from reusing materials. Consider licenses such as CC-BY-NC (Non Commercial), which is permissive for those who use the material for Non-Commercial uses.

  1. Who is the audience? Who is the material for?

  2. Are instructor notes available?

For their workshops, The Carpentries include extensive instructor notes that cover what was and was not successful during a workshop; such a resource is invaluable to understanding whether the material is written at an appropriate level for learners.

  1. Is there a code of conduct?

5. Encourage the formation of an educational community around an educational resource

A quick and simple way to encourage community formation is to start a Slack channel associated with a resource. Encourage discussion and questions there.

Be responsive to feedback and be willing to give contributor roles to people who suggest changes to the material.

6. Foster growth and updates of your material through quarterly hackathons or sprints

Acknowledgments