Less is More: enabling mass and rapid development of learning materials in healthcare subjects

by Mr Steve Fox, Ms Rachel Ellaway, Dr David Dewhurst, Mr Michael Begg

The creation of quality online teaching and learning materials (beyond PowerPoint) has not been an economic route for academics to take. This was a particular problem for teachers in medicine and veterinary medicine at the University of Edinburgh and for those that support them. The solution that has been adopted has been to develop an online authoring, delivery and reporting/analysis system for learning materials that meets the needs of both multimedia developers and teachers. This system is called EROS (Edinburgh Reusable Online Sequencer).
Teachers can use the EROS authoring interface to build and edit online teaching materials. A runtime mechanism delivers the sequences to students online, it stores feedback and responses, and it provides reports to teachers. EROS allows users to create any kind of learning sequence, ranging from purely instructional learning packages (with no assessment element) to simple quizzes (with a variety of question types but no narrative element) or any combination of the two. The ability to create materials online means that academics can work independently or with other academics in creating materials. Taking an object-oriented perspective means that individual pages/questions can be reused in other contexts. Since it began in 2003 over 6,000 page/question items have been created using EROS and more are being added all the time. There are 40 discrete topic packages running out of the system to users in Edinburgh as well as to other universities.
EROS's template-driven approach has facilitated teachers in developing their own teaching and learning materials, quickly, easily and with minimal support. Although EROS can be used by experienced multimedia developers to create media-rich and complex user experiences, it is the enabling and empowering of the academic community to engage with e-learning that has been the main focus of EROS and its most important success.

ID Number: 520

Date: Wednesday, 7th September 2005

Time: 1430

Location:

Theme: architectures and infrastructures