Tufts Open Course Ware - OER

OER

Tufts OCW can be considered within the broader context of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. OER can include open content, tools, or infrastructure. Tufts has been engaging in OER work for more than a decade, with the majority of efforts related to the development of the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK). TUSK is an integrated digital repository and curriculum knowledge management and delivery system used by Tufts’ health sciences schools and programs, and health sciences institutions in India, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and the United States. TUSK’s use of the National Library of Medicine’s Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) as the controlled vocabulary for its content management (metadata, searching, etc.) enables the creation and delivery of integrated, developmental curricula by individuals or teams of faculty across the health sciences. In 2002, UNESCO organized the ‘‘Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries,’’ which was attended by representatives of universities from both developed and developing countries. At this conference, the term ‘‘open education resource’’ was more clearly defined as ‘‘the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use, and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes’’.

In addition to TUSK, a number of other Tufts OER initiatives can be accessed from the Tufts OCW site including:

• The Child & Family WebGuide – describes trustworthy websites on topics of interest to parents and professionals.
• The Perseus Digital Library – provides content and tools to enhance the study of the classics, including ancient Greek and Latin literature, history, art and archeology.
• Selected Patient Information Resources in Asian Languages (SPIRAL) – funded by the National Library of Medicine to promote patient education, particularly for the underserved, provides health information in Chinese, Cambodian/Khmer, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Thai and Vietnamese.
• Tufts Digital Library – digital resources produced and developed at Tufts University for teaching and research; built on Fedora, an Open Source digital repository architecture.
• Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) – an information management application that provides an interactive, concept mapping interface to digital resources accessed via the Web, from FEDORA-based digital repositories, FTP servers, or local file systems.