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mEducator - Overview
Terms of use
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Terms of use
These contents have been obtained from the mEducator web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the mEducator web site for additional information on terms of use.
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The mEducator Best Practice Network (BPN) aims to implement and critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared and re-used across European higher academic institutions.
Although there is an abundance of medical educational content available in individual EU academic institutions, this is not widely available or easy to discover and retrieve, due to lack of standardized content sharing mechanisms. The aim of mEducator BPN is to implement and critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared and re-used across European higher academic institutions.
Educational content included in mEducator covers and represents the whole range of medical educational content, from traditional instructional teaching to active learning and experiential teaching/studying approaches. It spans the whole range of types, from text to exam sheets, algorithms, teaching files, computer programs (simulators or games) and interactive objects (like virtual patients and electronically traced anatomies), while it covers a variety of topics.
mEducator aims to:- examine to what extent existing standards for the description of educational material can address all the possible types of medical educational material listed above, and make respective recommendations for standards extensions;
- examine to what extent existing standards for educational material packaging and exchange among learning management systems are adequate to support state-of-the art educational content sharing in medicine and provide respective recommendations for standards extensions
- examine to what extent a recently proposed standard-based reference model for automated educational content discovery, retrieval and sharing can be deployed for medical educational content delivery and sharing and whether extensions are required.
As a BPN, mEducator will attempt to compare two contemporary ways of achieving this content sharing, namely, a solution based on Web2.0 technologies, and a solution based on Semantic Web Services.
mEducator will work closely with MedBiquitous Europe standardization body to adopt and implement MedBiquitous technology standards for medical and healthcare education in order to make medical content interoperable and shareable across the European Union. For this to succeed, material is re-purposed for multilingual, multicultural use and access. Provision of the material to non-partner institutes is planned with the foreseen (sustainability) aim to invite more institutes in the distributed pool. Last but not least, mEducator will invite students, educators, and health professionals (continuing education) to evaluate its outcomes.mEducator Web Site |
Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the mEducator web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the mEducator web site for additional information on terms of use.
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mEducator aims to:
- identify and collect a critical mass of different types of health educational material.
- examine to what extend existing standards like Healthcare LOM can address all types of health educational material listed above, and make respective recommendations for standards extensions.
- examine to what extend existing standards like SCORM for Healthcare are adequate to support the packaging and seamless delivery of all these types of educational material.
- examine possible extensions of existing ontological schemata, which describe the semantics of LOs (e.g. s-LOM ontology).
- communicate and interact with standardization bodies like MedBiquitous Europe, IEEE, IMS, CEN, Health On the Net, HL7, etc to ensure adoption of recommendations/extensions into standards.
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Expected results
Key transferable outcomes of the mEducator BPN include: - A metadata scheme for description of all types of medical educational content, with reference to relevant standards (i.e. Healthcare LOM).
- Recommendations on how to apply and/or extend the medical educational standard Healthcare LOM to address variable types of medical content, content re-purposing, and content sharing and exchange
- Recommendations on best practices in implementing and using standardized commonplace technology and respective reference models for content medical educational content use, re-use and sharing.
- Medical educational content of a vast variety of types, formally described, re-purposed and delivered along existing standards in loosely coupled isolated LCMSs and in federated LCMSs of the partners.
- A simple IPR scheme for educational content provided and re-purposed in academic networks.
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Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the mEducator web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the mEducator web site for additional information on terms of use.
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Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR, with the Lab of Medical Informatics will lead this project along with its Office of Education. The AUTH team will be headed by Dr. P. Bamidis, Assistant Professor of Medical Education Informatics, with research interests in technology enhanced learning in medical education, affective and physiological computing and HCI. Dr. Kallinikou, Associate Professor of Law in Athens Law School at the National and Kapodistrian University of Greece, and an Attorney-at-Law, a highly specialized expert in Intellectual Property and Creative Commons (CC) will be collaborating with the AUTH team and will organise activities related to IPR regarding sharing medical educational content. Highly expert medical teaching and evaluation capacity, as well as, scientific project co-ordination and management skills are provided though the participation of Prof. Pappas, Director of the Medical Information Management Centre at the Medical School of AUTH, and Prof. Dombros, the Dean of the medical School, but also the overall supervisor of the Medical Education Office and the Training the Trainers programme at AUTH. Last but not least, the AUTH team is joined by numerous researchers in the field of e-learning, medical informatics and information systems. |
University of Cyprus
UCY has a long-standing experience including technical knowhow, manpower, and infrastructure to facilitate and ensure the success of this project. The team of UCY will be headed by Assoc. Prof. C. Pattichis who has 20 years experience in eHealth systems and services, including elearning. He was also the project leader of the INTERREG III B Archimed project: A Mediterranean Research and Higher Education Intranet in Medical and Biological Sciences (where P1-AUTH and P3-DUTH also participated), which was highly related to the activities of this project. The University of Cyprus, will lead WP 8 Exit and Sustainability and will take part as technology provider, content provider/user, as well as take part in the process of evaluation and dissemination. |
Democritus University of Thrace
The activities of the Democritus University of Thrace (GR) team will be coordinated by Assis. Prof. E. Kaldoudi, who has 15 years experience in health telematics projects including elearning, with her research interests including elearning in medical education, and especially applying web 2.0 technologies to support active learning. She will be involved in recommendataions for metadata scheme, implementing the content sharing infrastucture, and producing recommendations towards a reference model for content sharing. Prof. V. Vargemezis, as the Head of the Office of Medical Education will participate in pedagogical issues analysis and dissemination of the project’s results, will coordinate the provision, organization and description of the content provided by DUTH, and will also coordinate the implementation of content sharing, testing and evaluation in DUTH (more than 120 educators and 800 students per year). Assist. Prof. M. Papaioakeim has a more than 25 years research and academic experience in medical education, and among else has been the coordinator of ECTS DUTH compliance, Erasmus project, and participated in a number of committees dealing with medical education. He will be involved in the metadata scheme definition and the evaluation of content sharing infrastructure. Ms. A. Chaztopoulou is an associate researcher coordinating evaluation and sustainability studies, and thus she will be involved in evaluation study design and the sustainability of the network. Ms. D. Delikosta is a PhD student in the Dept. of Education Sciences in the area of Learning Objects in Virtual Educational Environments and will be involved in the implementation of the metadata scheme and the content sharing infrastructure. |
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
The UTCN (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca) team is coordinated by Prof. Dorian Gorgan, and concerns with graphics models development and simulation, interactive distributed applications, Grid computing, graphics cluster based remote visualization, and graphical user interactivity in elearning applications. In mEducator project the main technical activity is to adapt and extend interactive software tools for the development of the graphics annotation based medical learning objects. Based on the already experimented eTrace eLearning Platform, the UTCN team will provide an elearning environment supporting lesson authoring, user annotation on 2D and 3D learning objects, lesson execution, and knowledge assessment by evaluation of graphics annotation. The lessons will be able to aggregate federated content based on semantic Web and Grid services. Collaborative tools for graphics annotation on the teaching materials both in the presentation and knowledge assessment sessions will be developed for different categories of users, such as teachers, students, content providers, content presenters, and knowledge evaluators. The final activity concerns with recommendations on best practices of the development of graphics annotation based learning objects. Prof. D. Gorgan will lead the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, RO, providing his expertise as technology provider and pedagogical expert. His field of interest consists graphical modelling and simulation, and distributed interactive applications. |
SITUSI Limited
The activities of SITUSI will be to coordinate technical aspects of educational web platform and Lead WP 4. By benefiting from actual Web 2.0 capabilities new training systems require new methods and platforms to be implemented under international and European standards. SITUSI has a clinical platform called MDPIXX to share medical images, videos and clinical cases. The platform uses standards for terminology (SNOMED) and document interchange (CDA, DICOM). MDPIXX will be a base platform to be used for the project. Also Health2.info can be a news channel to help and feed content.
SITUSI has a technical team with lot of expertise in web 2.0 development and platforms and will provide the adequate resource to coordinate the work package and implement the new functionalities that the project requires for a successful output. |
University Nice Sophia Antipolis
Assoc. Prof. P. Staccini, will lead the UoSofia Antipolis, FR, team. Prof. Staccini is Chief of the Department of “Medical Information and Informatics”, at the Teaching Hospital in Nice, and the expertise of his group covers health telematics applications and elearning. UNS will be highly involved in WP3 Content Enrichment, re-purposing and Evolution. |
Medical University Plovdiv
The Medical University, Plovdiv, BG, will participate as pedagological expert, content provider and user. Assoc. Prof. Lyubima Despotova-Toleva, MD, PhD, is highly involved in eMedicine, including elearning. |
University degli studi di Catania
The Department of Computer Engineering and the Department of Medical and Surgical Science of the Università degli Studi di Catania, IT, participate in the project as pedagological expert, technology provider, and evaluator expert. The activities of the University of Catania (Italy) will be coordinated by Prof. D. Giordano, who has 18 years experience in the design, development and evaluation of advanced learning technologies and has been the coordinator if the Minerva- Socrates project "I-Trace" (Interactive tracing and graphical annotation in pen-based e-learning). She is an active researcher in the area of medical image processing and multimodal information retrieval and will be involved in the project in the definition of a flexible and adaptive scheme for medical educational content description; in the definition of the metadata and procedures for content re-purposing; in the preparation of in the implementation and evaluation of the first solution for content discovery and retrieval based on loosely coupled LCMS. Part of the team will be: Prof. A Faro, of the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e Telecomunicazioni, who has 25 years experience in the design and implementation of distributed systems; Ing. Carmelo Pino, who is a Ph.D. Student in the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica e Telecomunicazioni who has experience in semantic web technologies and in the development of LCMS; Ing. Francesco Maiorana, who has a long standing collaboration with the department in the area of content discovery and information retrieval; they will be involved in the preparation, the implementation and evaluation of the first solution for content discovery and retrieval based on loosely coupled LCMS; finally, Prof.Rosalia Leonardi of the Dipartimento di Specialita' Medico-chirurgiche, where she is director of the Specialization School in Orthodontics, will work towards expanding the network of content providers at the Italian level. The UNICT team will be involved in dissemination activities and in providing recommendations to towards a reference model for content sharing. |
University of Helsinki
The Media Education Centre of the University of Helsinki, FI, has extensive expertise on open and distance learning technologies, as well as on computer-mediated human communication Sanna Vahtivuori-Hänninen, Ph.Lic. (Educ.) is senior lecturer in mediaeducation and has 10 years experience in the area of educational use of ICTs and media education. Her recent research interests include the use of pedagogical models in designing and evaluation network-education, collaborative and experiential modes of studying in network-based environments, medialiteracy in web 2.0, games and simulations, and mobile learning. She will lead the mEducator team in the tasks of pedagological expert, and evaluation, in designing game-based learning objects for medical education and producing recommendations towards a reference model. Dr. Heikki Kynäslahti, Adjunct Professor in University of Helsinki will also contribute to mEducator activities. His research interests include blended learning, teacher's pedagogical thinking in network-based education, conceptual framework of mobile learning, and volition and web 2.0. UH will lead WP6 Recommendations on Best Practices. |
St. George's, University of London
The ativities of St George's University of London (SGUL) team will be coordinated by Terry Poulton and Chara Balasubramaniam, who as Bioscientists, have over 16 years combined experience in e-learning for medicine and other healthcare discipline. Both Terry and Chara are involved in currently leading the eViP project, also co-funded by the eContentplus programme and have a good working understanding of it's aims, objectives and anticipated outcomes. Due to it's close relationship with MedBiquitous, in the form of MedBiquitous Europe, St George's would see it's main contribution to the mEducator project in standards adoption and implementation, IPR models for sharing medical digital content, repurposing and content enrichment, and dissemination and awareness. SGUL's E-learning Unit has a proven track record of managing, delivering, and realising the benfeits from a number of projects and due to it's relationship with MedBiquitous are suitably placed to ensure that current up-to-date standards are adhered to. SGUL will lead WP2 Content Preparation and Standards Implementation, as well as WP3 Content Enrichment, Re-purposing and Evolution. |
Succubus Interactive
Succubus Interactive is a company specialized in 3D technology development, offering innovative modeling, simulation and visualization solutions, based on advanced technologies such as virtual reality, non photo realistic rendering and GUI techniques. Laurent Auneau leads Succubus development team with great efficiency on commercial productions (DCN, INERIS, video game industry) as well as in R&D. Florent de Grissac is the bridge between scientifical matters and their video game translation. He’s Succubus manager since 2002 and works as artistic director since autumn 2007. Frédéric Compagnon is the key developer and is Succubus maths and physics expert. |
The Open University
The Open University (OU) is the world leader in distance teaching and the largest university in the UK. It is also well known as the UK's most innovative and high-impact concept in higher education which has re-shaped the notion of quality distance learning. The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the OU to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU's very nature. Approximately 70 researchers, technologists and designers work in the fields of the semantic Web and knowledge services, knowledge management, social software, new media systems, narrative hypermedia, and multimedia systems. Relevant EU projects are DIP (507483) SUPER (026850), LUISA (027149) and NeOn (027595).
Role in the project: OU will lead WP5, the work on the use of Semantic Web Services for context-adaptive discovery of eLearning resources. Additionally, contributions will be provided to the semantic integration of heterogeneous resources and context modelling.
Prof. Dr. John Domingue, the Deputy Director and Professor at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) will lead the team at OU. Additional key researchers at KMI will be Dong Liu and Neil Benn; both bringing in experience from EC projects in the areas of eLearning and Semantic Web Services. |
European Cervical Cancer Association
The ECCA was established in 2002 specifically to raise awareness of the benefits of organised cervical cancer prevention programmes and advocate for their implementation. To achieve this goal, the ECCA has brought together Europe’s leading cancer societies, medical associations, cervical cancer researchers, clinicians and patient groups to form a Europe-wide network of expertise covering all aspects of cervical cancer prevention. This extensive network has then been complemented by the ECCA’s health communications experts and, working together, the ECCA has mounted a co-ordinated education and advocacy programme that now reaches almost every country in Europe. The Institutional Membership of the ECCA continues to grow and now stands at 92 institutional members from 32 countries across Europe, including the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) and Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). The ECCA has produced a set of consensus agreed educational materials that were developed in a pan-European consultation process involving the ECCA’s members and other relevant organisaitons. Dr. Philip Davies, Director General, will lead the activities of ECCA for the evaluation of the mEducator activities and content by its network of users. |
Coventry University
Coventry University has a long tradition of undertaking training, applied research and consultancy to meet the needs of local, national and international clients in the pubic and private sector. Coventry University Enterprises, a subsidiary of Coventry University Higher Education Corporation, is the organisation through which the University runs much of its commercial, income-generating and business-partnership work. The Serious Games Institute is a new initiative designed to support regional development and to create a national hub for excellence in the fields of serious games, virtual world applications and interactive digital media. Located in the Innovation Village, the Institute includes an applied research team that works closely with companies who are leading experts in the field. The SGI has already commenced world leading projects in the field including the Save the World Programme, the Second Life Science City Project and Interactive Digital Media funded Serious Games Exposed project.
As a world leader in the field of serious games and virtual world applications, the applied research group is adopting multi-disciplinary methods and approaches underpinning both participatory design methods as well as exploiting inductive (or multiple methodologies) of investigation. The CU team, led by Dr. Sara de Freitas, includes psychologists, educationalists, developers and social scientists and make use of a range of methodologies of investigation. CU will contribute as content and technical provider to the mEducator project. |
The workplan of mEducator project is set in a total of nine work packages (each work package exhibits a number of individual actions - angel):- WP1 engages preparatory actions for project start-up.
- WP2 deals with content preparation and implementation/extension of metadata description standards, addressing also issues of IPR and content selection rules.
- WP3 is devoted to issues related to content re-purposing. In order to emphasize on the importance of content re-purpose the entire work package is concentrated on that.
- WP4, WP5, & WP6 , undertake the implementation, comparison and evaluation of two alternative solutions for sharing medical educational content on the web; in specific, loosely coupled isolated content repositories vs. federated content repositories.
- WP7 encompasses awareness and dissemination activities with special attention to relevant EU clustering activities and interaction with standardization bodies in the field.
- WP8 involves work for project exit, with an emphasis on sustainability, and finally
- WP9 deals with project management.
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