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.
