QR Codes, iPads and Anatomy Pots!

The RVC has for some time been experimenting with ways to bring its traditional anatomy museum to life. The facility in Camden houses a fantastic collection of skeletons, pots, plastinated specimens and computer based animations. However, the number of students actually visiting the museum and using these resources is actually quite low.

Recently the e-Media Unit has been working with academic staff to try and find new ways of bringing these anatomical treasures to life. One of the first initiatives was the creation of potcasts which are short video descriptions of annotated specimens. These can be viewed on an iPod or mobile phone whilst examining the specimen pots. Feedback from students has been really positive about these resources with many commenting that the experience of listening to a spoken description was almost more effective than having a face to face description.

Whilst the potcasts have proved popular, we wanted to explore ways that these resources could be used anywhere rather than tied to the anatomy museum. This led to a number of innovations including publishing all the potcasts on the WikiVet Media streaming server (http://media.wikivet.net/media/porcine-uterus-potcast). This site looks similar to YouTube but provides a secure and dedicated veterinary video resource. Videos uploaded onto this site can then either be viewed directly or embedded within relevant pages on WikiVet or other sites.

As part of the recently launched Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum (www.onlineveterinaryanatomy.net) website, we were able to explore new ways of turning a museum into a virtual space. One idea that we adopted was to create a series of QR codes which can be read by a mobile phone or iPad and linked to web pages on WikiVet. Key pots now have QR codes but we have also created QR categories (see the links below) which lead to collections of videos and descriptive text. With the rapid growth in student ownership of iPads and other mobile devices, we think these codes could be a great way help students locate useful virtual anatomy collections whether in the museum or in the comfort of their own homes!

Try scanning any of the links below using a QR Code reader (free to download) on your phone or iPad.

Thanks to Joanna Fisher and Lucy Warrell, Anatomy Demonstrators at the RVC for creating the QR Code collections.

OVAM Launch

Last week the Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum (OVAM) launch took place in the Lightwell area of the Royal Veterinary College's (RVC) Camden campus in London. Almost a hundred people attended the event ranging from academics to members of the press and students some having travelled over especially from other countries. The evening provided a fascinating insight into the teaching of veterinary anatomy and how it has evolved with presentations by project director Nick Short, senior anatomist Dr. Raymond Macharia and vice-principal of teaching and learning Professor Stephen May of the RVC alongside the special guest - vet and TV presenter Mark Evans. As well as a chance to view some of the key resources which are part of the museum and the innovative Sectra visualisation table

The OVAM website is now live and for those who have not yet had a chance to view the site you can take a look at www.onlineveterinaryanatomy.net. The site is still a work in progress - we hope that it will constantly evolve as new material is produced and contributed to the museum. So please continue to revisit the site, encourage your colleagues and peers to access it and don't hesitate to get in touch with the OVAM team if you would like to contribute something more to the site.

Project Sustainability

The OVAM project set out a year ago with the ambitious objective to collate and repurpose as many already existing veterinary anatomical resources as possible. It aimed to do this by involving a large number of partner institutions who would be responsible for contributing resources and assigning an eCurator to work on improving some of these.  They would not only collect the resources but also assemble them into useful presentations with a high educational value. This ambition alone makes the project highly unique within its field as there are no other veterinary anatomy collections of comparable size with such an extensive range of partners, at an international level. It is difficult to put a finite value against a resource such as this, however its potential to enrich the studies and knowledge of all veterinary anatomists across the world is irrefutable.

By collecting together the wealth of already existing resources available amongst partners and storing them in one place,  a reliable, easily accessible and innovative new tool has been created. No doubt its impact will be seen at many levels. This is an activity which is especially important in light of the current economic climate, where students face a constant struggle against the increased costs of study, and where raised tuition fees and a higher cost of living often impacts negatively on their means to purchase additional study materials, such as text books. A resource open to everyone provides equal opportunities for all, including those further afield, internationally and to laypeople interested in learning anatomy. As well as providing a useful tool for students it is also expected that the collection will be utilised by academics in their teaching. Resources in an area may be lacking at their own institutions or they may wish to provide links to additional study material. The international collection will help to reduce duplication of effort, with many academics previously often producing similar materials. 

The creation of such a collection should help to reduce confusion amongst students about where they should be looking for resources, an issue which has increasingly become a problem with large amounts of unreliable and unmonitored material appearing on the internet in recent years. By addressing these issues it is hoped that the Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum will revolutionise anatomy teaching and the way students learn, providing them with the opportunity to access highly innovative materials which allow the chance to revise a subject as many times as the student wishes, without the limitations of physical dissections, whilst also being interactive, aiding to enrich their learning experience.

It is anticipated that this is only the start of a new approach to the sharing of anatomy teaching resources and that as the site is publicised additional partners will be keen to commit and contribute content, helping to further enhance the museum in return for full access to the back-room or 'stack' where the entire selection of resources are stored. Involvement in the project will hopefully work as an incentive for partners to actively maintain and continue adding to the museum collectively, minimising the need for additional outside input after the close of the project, whilst also working to actively encourage their students to utilise the resource to the full.

In addition to long-term support from academic partners it is hoped that the support of commercial partners such as Elsevier and Manson Publishing in the museum project and others such as Pfizer and Mars in the wider WikiVet project, which is closely associated, will help to provide further financial assistance. This may be in the form of funding new content, contributing a percentage of existing texts or helping to source staff salaries in order to assist partners and sustain the site. As well as these mechanisms for support the broader WikiVet project is working towards a commercialisation model in order to become self-sustaining. Using a "freemium" model this will aim to generate some income on additional supplementary material to the already existing free open educational resources. This may be through the sale of short low-cost e-lectures or an online bookshop recommending the most useful anatomy texts and taking a percentage of the book sales.

3D Visualisations

As another part of the OVAM project Per Karlsson a recent graduate from the Royal Veterinary College is working to develop an interface which will allow the use of datasets to provide 3D visualisations of anatomical structures. The first area which is being developed as a prototype is the equine distal limb. A high level of functionality will be included in the end product. Each structure will have an information tab which will appear when clicked on with descriptive text, alternative names for the structure, embedded images and related videos as well as links to other resources such as WikiVet pages or other OVAM resources. Structures and body systems can be added and turned on/off and then reset with the possibility to add audio at a later stage in development. The aim is to have created an interface where different datasets can easily be imported to create 3D visualisations. If you are interested in collaborating and have any datasets which you would like to share then please get in touch with us.  

Shown above is a draft view of how the interface may look. The prototype can be viewed at http://www.ovam.scopty.com/

Asset Bank and New Content

The content management system - Asset Bank which we will be using for OVAM is now fully up and running. After lots of work to tweak it for the project to make it the most effective it can be our e-Curators have been busy starting to upload content from their schools. The Asset Bank allows extensive categorisation and meta-tagging of material making it easily searchable. As well as features such as the categorisation and tagging facilities it is also capable of hosting a very wide variety of file formats, allowing us to store the majority of content in one place, minimising any confusion that multiple storage sites would have for users.

Over the next few weeks we will start to be able to offer some examples of the fantastic content which will be included in the museum.

This high quality image of the equine humerus from the right forelimb in situ (lateral view) is from Peter Tomlinsons' project, the curator at the University of Liverpool.

Vet Ed Symposium Edinburgh

The annual Veterinary Education Symposium was held last week in Edinburgh and as part of the program we held an OVAM workshop which was well attended and very productive. After a brief introduction and background we moved on to consider the subject of student projects.  Most of the curators will be working during a decided timeframe on a project to collate some of their schools materials into a more complete resource. However, the key to these being successful learning resources involves the consideration of a number of factors. We divided people into groups and asked them to identify a specific learning resource related to the veterinary curriculum and brainstorm what was important in their opinions when creating these including the key issues which needed to be considered by staff and students.
Some of the points people felt were important were
- The level of detail within the resource, and how to make this appropriate for different curriculums.
- The organisation of the resource, starting with simple and moving to complex.
- The learning objectives for the resource and the areas covered other than just pure structural anatomy such as function and physiology, histology and pathology.
- The contextualisation of the resource and the topic covered.
Ultimately it was concluded that the organisation of these individual resources within the museum structure will be key to the success and usability of this project. We would like to thank everybody who joined us and provided us with a useful insight into what they feel are the key factors which we should be bearing in mind.

e-Curator Projects

Some of our student e-curators have now started work on the OVAM project. They are tasked with speaking to academics at their schools and compiling a list of resources which could be used as part of the museum. Once an inventory of all the resources available has been completed some of the curators will then be going on to put these together into a presentation type project. This provides a good way of improving the usability of resources by combining them with other complimentary items on the same topic, essentially creating a more complete learning resource, which students can then use to revise and learn about the area which it covers.


So far some of the projects which are being undertaken include:
- A series of narrated presentations on the organisation of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems including written information, dissection images, histology photos and animated images.
- Translation of the interactive anatomy programs from the University of Murcia on the anatomy of the bird and the pig .
- An anatomical guide to the skeletal structure of the equine forelimb in the form of a presentation with extensively labeled photos identifying skeletal landmarks, additional information relating structure to function and self-assessment components.
- Labeling and addition of self-assessment to presentations detailing whole horse and ox dissections.

JISC at the RVC

Last week, Paola from JISC visited the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) to discuss progress of the OVAM project. We briefly talked about the recent activities, including the student e-curator weekend and meetings with the publishers. Overall everything seems to be under control so far but we would not want to speak too soon! Most of the resource collection work is yet to commence but we are sure that with so many enthusiastic individuals involved it will be a success.

At the RVC museum

Triggered by the discussion about the Programme event  in Birmingham Nick attended, we talked about how many of the RVC projects funded by JISC made following projects possible, links not always easily identified. It is wonderful how so many ideas that made it to fruition then led to other ideas and projects, often quite innovative. Even OVAM project is really a follow up of Opening Veterinary Access to Literature (OVAL) and has so many connections with another project RVC is also part of, PublishOER.

The visit would not have been complete without showing Paola the "real" veterinary museum, where she could put her hands on some specimen used in teaching.

Manson Publishing Meeting

Manson Publishing is another of the partners in the OVAM project. They will be contributing a percentage of content from their texts to the museum. Manson's were also involved in the previous JISC funded Opening Access to Veterinary Literature (OVAL) project where flashcards were created using questions from some of their books.

Nick and Bara met with Matt from Mansons to discuss the details of how we will work together for the museum. Some key anatomy texts were identified which have some fantastic images and diagrams in them. These contributions will be a very important addition to the museum and will be recognised in a similar way to the flashcards in the OVAL project with attribution to the contributor and a link to their website for those interested in purchasing the whole text.

The next step in the process is for us to carefully work through the texts and identify the parts we feel will be most valuable as a learning resource for students. This will not be an easy task as we are really spoilt for choice!

Visit to Animals Inside Out

The Natural History Museum has a new exhibition by the well known German anatomists Gunter von Hagen called Animals Inside Out. We went along yesterday to have a look at their examples of plastination and skeletal structures. The exhibition starts out with a number of stunning presentations of octopuses and sharks like the figurehead (not hammer head!) shark below. With special lighting this really is a stunning exhibit - worth visiting if just for this.

Image Link : http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/images/1007/shark-slide_109325_1.jpg   

There are also a range of plastinated domestic species demonstrating structure such as the horses lower foot, cervical vertebra. As vets we were pretty sure that the positioning of the cervical vertebra was rather un natural and there seemed to be evidence of some quite severe spondylosis too. One interesting information panel described the only anatomical difference between a sheep and a goat - have a guess (answers on an email to wikimaster@wikivet.net). The real star piece in this section was the charging bull below - though it looked rather "plastic" to me!

Image Link : http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/images/1007/bull-gallery-slide_109426_1.jpg 

Finally, the last room had some of the larger specimens including the giraffe and the famous elephant. These must have taken years to make and were particularly impressive because muscles had been teased apart to demonstrate vascular supplies and innervation. I had hope to see a few more display items (the skeletons were nothing special) and a few of the horse structures that von Hagens is so famous for - but still well worth the visit.

Image authorised for use by http://www.bodyworlds.com 

OVAM Weekend Workshop

Last weekend we held the OVAM Weekend Workshop for all of the e-Curators from partner vetschools in the project. Overall, eleven curators attended from Edinburgh, Liverpool, Nottingham, Cambridge, Bristol, RVC, Dublin, Murcia, Utrecht and Bern making it a truly international weekend. We were delighted to have students from so many places.

Everybody arrived in London on Friday evening and had a relaxed evening to get to know each other a bit. The aim of the workshop was to act as a type of forum for discussion as well as the presentation of some concepts and ideas which the curators will need to consider for in their work. On Saturday and Sunday we covered a vast range of aspects about the museum, including the background to the project and how it will fit into WikiVet, the practicalities of different design ideas and how resources will be selected, as well as people's own experience of anatomy at their respective schools. We also had a look at an example of Asset Bank which we think will be the most appropriate platform to act as the 'stack' for storage of all the digital resources which will make up the museum. Licensing issues cropped up again, ensuring that all material is correctly licensed and released with all the necessary information is going to be paramount to the success of the project. The curators helped us brainstorm possible designs and navigation routes for the museum interface, ideas such as having a 'Google' type search box, favorites pages for academics to highlight resources they feel are particularly useful and drop down menus acting as filters were all useful suggestions.

Overall we hope that the weekend was useful and enjoyable for all the students that attended and provided a good opportunity for them to meet with their peers and clarify what will be required of them in their work over the following months. We are very grateful to have such enthusiastic students, who have already contributed lots of great ideas to the project, helping to ensure that this collaboration will result in a very exciting resource indeed!

JISC OER Networking Day

This whole day event was an opportunity for colleagues from a range of JISC funded projects to meet up and share experiences. Over 60 people came along from universities and institutions throughout the UK. Whilst we are all working on the same sort of things (Open Educational Resources), we don't often get a chance to get together and find out what everybody else is at.

It all seemed a bit daunting at times with poster sheets, coloured post it notes, floating tables and all sort of exercises to break the ice and get people talking. I wasn't too sure that my colleagues would have much interest in an online stash of anatomy exhibits ..... However, I found that there was a wide range of other projects which were perhaps not main streaming but nevertheless of great value to a niche audience.

The networking activities seemed to slow down as lunch approached. However by the afternoon we had reassembled into some more focussed workshop groups discussing the real issues we face about getting Senior Management buy in for OERs, problems of consent and where to keep all these resources.

My strongest impression was there seemed to be very little plans for long term sustainability once the JISC funding dries up. We discussed the possibility of developing new business models - something very close to the "heart" of OVAM but I think much more thought and attention is needed in this area by us all if the good work is to carry on.

Finally at these events one always comes away having met some interesting people. There was Zac from JISC Digital, Gillian and Susannah from MEDEV (RIP), Teresa for Cambridge and Paola of course from JISC.

Thanks to everybody for putting the event on ..... and the great lunch!

Other partners

As well as the schools which are partners in the museum there are also a number of other partners. These range from publishing houses such as Elsevier and Manson Publishing to the RCVS Trust to MEDEV. Over the last week we have been busy meeting with these partners.

We met with representatives from Elsevier to discuss what they will be able to contribute to the museum and how this in turn will benefit them as a publisher. A percentage of their material will be made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) in the OVAM with reciprocal links between the publisher site and the museum. Currently we are busy working together and selecting what the most appropriate material to include in the museum will be.

Clare Boulton from the RCVS trust has also been helping us to think about the best way to catalogue the material and categorise it in a sensible and user friendly manner, making it easily accessible via different routes via which users may enter the museum. As well as this Clare has also been helping us consider which historical anatomical resources may be appropriate for inclusion in the museum.

Delicious Bookmarks

As part of the process of collecting ideas for OVAM we are using a great site called Delicious (www.delicious.com) to bookmark relevant pages with ideas and interesting content. Once registered you can create a virtual 'stack' to which you can add links as and when you please. Each link can be tagged and described. Your stack then displays your description and a sample of text and an image if there are any and collates them onto one easily accessible page which you can easily refer to. This page is also viewable by other users of the site who may be interested in similar content or subject areas.

If you would like to see the OVAM stack with some of the things that we think are interesting go Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum: http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/MhdjUe

Mind Mapping the Museum

As we gather a more comprehensive idea of the resources available for the museum we are starting to brainstorm potential ways in which things can be organised in the most sensible, accessible and user friendly manner.

To help do this we have created some mindmaps to give a more visual idea of the structure of the museum. There will be a 'front door' to the museum where users can follow specific routes through selecting where they want to go but there will also be various 'back doors' to the content, allowing those users with a specific resource or topic in mind to reach the content directly.

Hartpury College

As well as vet schools Hartpury College near Gloucester is also a partner in the project.

On our tour we also visited them and saw all of the incredible facilities at the campus and hope that their participation will encourage a wider audience to use the museum than just vets, vet students and vet nurses.

We also hope that our partnership with Hartpury in the project may help to foster closer relationships in the future between other professions associated with the veterinary industry as well as stronger links with the vet schools, enabling academics to share teaching resources and methods.

Although the anatomy taught at Hartpury is predominantly equine there are also many comparative aspects which are incorporated into the course as this is fundamental to understanding the structure and function of different species.

Photo from Bristol: Live Anatomy Area

Understanding User–Centred Design

I attended the JISC Web Usability Workshop yesterday. Dr Stuart Church talked about the need for user-centred design, the multiple ways one can do user research, design and its evaluation. The session provided useful pointers for the design process of our museum. We will need to establish user needs and keep asking users throughout the development so that we indeed produce something they will appreciate. We already have a reasonable idea of what our main users (students and lecturers) need, but nothing beats testing the design by naïve individuals.

During our partner visits we have been collating their expectations and needs and these will also be taken into account. Each of our stakeholders has different priorities and the challenge will be to come to a suitable compromise. The suggested route to this common ground is focusing on the end users’ experience. The UX vision (user experience) statement I mocked up during the session is: “The OVAM project is developing a real experience online veterinary anatomy museum with easily accessible quality resources allowing appropriate knowledge acquisition by learners.” Now this will need to be adjusted but it is a start.

One thing we need to keep in mind, we are not our users, even though we know them reasonably well. There are many ways of finding out what users want and need and we have already done some focus groups and questionnaires but utilising our soon to be recruited student curators in helping us ascertain the best possible design will be crucial to success. I really liked the idea of using personas (a user archetype used to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions and even visual design) not only for the museum design but also possibly for helping users choose their route of navigation? Anyway, it is a food for thought.

The design and prototyping session re-iterated the fact that providing examples of possible designs for others to comment on is a must. We could use simple hand drawn sketches but I believe that something more interactive will be preferable. And the final product evaluation, well, it does seem quite far for now but we need to plan for the usability testing. I like the idea of expressing the user reactions as a tag cloud. At least we should not be struggling to find our potential users to test the resource; most of them are easily reached via our partners!

Further School Visits

We have now visited all the UK vet schools apart from Liverpool, where we will be heading to shortly, despite the snow and cold weather! Every where that we have been to has helped us brain storm the project and come up with some more fantastic ideas, such as a competition for students to submit a short powerpoint of their best anatomy work to encourage them to become involved. The best entries will then form part of the museum.

We are now working towards compiling a more complete list of resources which can be contributed towards the museum. As well as the more common place anatomical specimens we also saw some more unusual ones. Such as this incredible crocodile skeleton at Bristol and this enormous whale skeleton at Cambridge, which you can see in the photos below.

Over the next week we will be emailing the partners with a job description for the student curator position as well as an overall summary of all of the great ideas and thoughts that people came up with. Meanwhile we are working hard to put the framework of the project in place so that we will be ready to organise all the resources which are contributed.