|1||Please provide a short description of the state-of-the-art and/or current trends in the field? How does the result fit into it?|
|To support their teaching, institutions often use a variety of web-based Learning (Content) Management Systems (LCMS), as well as, educational standards which are developed and adopted to enable the universal description of educational content. Moreover, “mashup” technologies have recently been used to implement efficient brokerage mechanisms for educational content sharing. Web 2.0 applications offer new opportunities for health education since it allows open access to information, sharing of ideas, questions, and opinions etc. So, the aim of mEducator Content Sharing Solution 1 is to elaborate on pedagogical, technical, standardization, cultural, social and legal issues and develop a standard-based infrastructure to enable the sharing of state-of-the-art digital medical educational content among medical educators and students in European higher academic institutions.|
|2||What is the problem/need/knowledge gap that the research result is responding to? How was it addressed before?|
|Medical Education encompasses not only the essential issue of education, but also the issue of health. It is necessary for health professionals (medial doctors mainly) to upgrade their knowledge and skills regularly throughout their professional lives in order to confront the increased needs in treatment and research.
Advances in ICT in recent years have pushed the development of a large number of tools and applications to support delivery of medical education; educational institutions are challenged to make the most of them to prepare processes that will allow the delivery of high-quality education to their students.
Furthermore, alternative teaching and learning methods have emerged. Medical Education curricula in most countries around the world are increasingly using case-based or problem-based learning models. A variety of Learning Management Systems are being developed to support institutions in their teaching and in managing their educational resources. These systems offer a variety of activities to the students, while standards are used to provide fixed structures for the cross-system exchange of resources, communication protocols and sharing of learning objects.
Medical Educators, Medical students and Specialized Doctors need to have access to high quality, overspecialized, interoperable educational content in state-of-the-art topics. They would also benefit from efficient search and discovery of educational content guidelines on how to easily repurpose educational material; they would gain a lot by accessing demonstrators or dedicated environments to collaboratively participate in different authoring scenarios of training, repurposing, standardizing and uploading material.
|3||What is the potential for further research?|
|The potential will be explored at the end of next year after the experimentation phase.
|4||What is the proposed method of IPR-protection? (patent, license, trademark etc.)|
|Platform IPR: Not available yet (GNU license possibly to be used, acknowledging the contribution of all partners)
Educational Content IPR:
The IPR issue has been a great challenge for the mEducator project. Partners have been informed of the legal aspects of intellectual property and issues on Copyright legislation as well as the acts of creators protected. The outcome was a resolution regarding the necessity of a license for all content items to become available through mEducator. The consortium recommended the use of the Creative Commons licensing scheme, although any other license is accepted. The above recommendations and decisions were established following consultation by experts highly involved and acknowledged in the IP sector.
The adoption of the Creative Commons licensing model in mEducator
The consortium has also developed guidelines, designed in the form of workflows, in an interactive platform to assist partners and stakeholders researching on IPR issues related to the content they would provide.
|5||What are the steps that need to be taken in order to secure the IPR-protection? What is the cost of IPR-protection?|
|Not available yet.
|6||What is you overall assessment of the scientific maturity of the research result?|
The product is scientifically oriented toward the state of art developments in the area of web based learning.
KEYWORDS QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT (0-5).
|Please put X as appropriate.||1||2||3||4||5|