This talk by Brendan Owers, Usher Institute, and Alison Christie, University of Edinburgh Business School, was presented at the ALT Online Winter Conference in November 2019. 

The Master of Public Health (MPH) online is a 3 year programme that is delivered entirely online to students from all over the world.

In June 2019 one of the group assignments on the MPH tasked students to choose from one of four behavioural risk factors and identify a population where one of these risks is causing significant harm. This learner-centred assessment instructed students to create a presentation that justified their choice of topic, critically analyse the problem and propose at least one evidence-based approach to tackle it.

Students were asked to present information, using Xerte, in a way that was engaging, informative and accessible to a non-specialist audience. Rather than produce something that would be presented one time only, it would be developed as a contained resource that would, with their permission, be made into an OER available for future cohorts and others to access.

This presentation explains how the Xerte authoring tool was used to facilitate the creation of open educational resources (OER) by our online students, providing them an opportunity to further their digital capabilities whilst thinking critically about themselves in a digital world. It covers what Xerte is, how students approached this task, their feedback, and how we intend to apply this to future assignments.

This presentation may be of interest to members of the community who are involved in the delivery or support of online programmes in HE and/or have an interest in students creating OER’s in an assessed environment.

You can listen to the recording of Brendan and Alison’s presentation here: OER digital curation using Xerte.