Open educational resources in simulation learning

Simshare news

• Final project report published (download at bottom of page)
• Sims at Learning in Law Annual Conference 10 – Open educational resources: why they matter | Are we using technology for technology’s sake? An evaluation of a simulated employment exercise | Moving from lectures to transactional learning: simulating probate

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Simshare was UKCLE’s open educational resources (OER) project, aimed at creating a repository of simulation resources. The project was part of the Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme – find out more on the about OER page and meet the Simshare project team.

What does Simshare do?

Simshare aimed to release a wide range of existing simulation learning resources across the educational sphere. It supported the release of open educational resources under a Creative Commons licence and collated and repurposed existing simulation materials for use by the higher education community.

UKCLE was also involved in simulation learning through the SIMPLE and the benefits of simulation are well documented. However the full scale development of widely shareable and repurposable content amongst simulation designers and users has been almost non-existent. This has had serious consequences for the uptake of simulation as a form of situated learning: if the power of simulation to help students learn is widely recognised, so too is the effort required by staff to create and resource simulations. Simshare aimed to resolve this by:

• repurposing simulation resources created by the SIMPLE project as open educational resources
• working with colleagues in other Academy subject centres, for example with the BMAF Network to support a simulation created in a management science module
• facilitating an interdisciplinary community of practice around simulation learning

Simshare encouraged simulation learning by helping staff to create, use, evaluate and repurpose simulations as OER. The project web infrastructure supported the creation and release of open educational simulation resources and collated and repurposed existing simulation materials for use by the community.

The Simshare site contains a significant amount of useful information about how simulations are used and the pedagogy supporting them. Simshare also introduced a spophisticated community of practice based on social networking technology. Through the community, academics can enter information about themselves and their work in the ‘My profile’ space while keeping up to date with what others are doing on the site.

See the methodology & progress page for more details.

What are the benefits of OER?

• An increase in applications to courses including those from international, and non-traditional learners
• An increase in student satisfaction concerning the quality of learning materials
• An enhancement of the global academic reputation of the department
• Advertising and marketing benefits to individual lecturers, HEIs and UK education, opening up universities to potential students
• Making use of the significant investment that has already been made in digital content by providing ways to reuse and repurpose existing resources and to demonstrate how they can be used for teaching and learning
• Improved value for money in resource creation for the UK HE sector
• Enhanced contribution to the public good and the developing world
• Support for new modes of online learning, such as those that involve the use of Web 2.0 tools
• A significant increase in the open availability and use of free high quality online resources

How can I get involved?

Whilst the formal project is now officially closed, we warmly encourage people to continue to contribute to the Simshare site. UKCLE has financed the hosting of the site for the next 3 years and hopes to see its resource bank and community grow and develop.

By way of background information, in the original call we encouraged the academic community to contribute and use simulation resources. These did not have to always be highly sophisticated materials (for example, one resource could be a witness statement for a role play). We then worked with them to repurpose their resources for the Simshare website to ensure they could showcase their work.

Resources may include:

• content resources; for example, statements, scenarios, character roles, ‘real life’ artefacts to produce authentic environments, photographs, videos
• information from websites on which you may run the simulation
• student and staff resources to support the simulation
• assessment criteria and other assessment guidelines
• Web 2.0 technologies to support the simulation; for example, podcasts, webcasts, online discussion forums
• evaluation materials
• academic papers about, or presentations on, the simulation, including PowerPoint presentations
• useful Web links
• guidelines on integrating your simulation into a module, including transcripts of lectures relating to the simulation

We hope that you will want to be part of the growing movement in open educational resources. Please do consider sharing your resources and contributing to the ever increasing numbers of resources already being collated.

How can I find out more?

• visit the Simshare site
• see what happened at our Simshare workshops – we held three workshops around the UK in early 2010 to share knowledge and experience
• keep up to date with the latest developments via the Simshare blog

View online pageflip of final report or download pdf below.

Last Modified: 14 October 2010