Openness and the Clinical Educator Programme
The Clinical Educator Programme (CEP) that I work for has undergone quite a few changes in the last year or so and not all of these are directly related to the current pandemic. The Programme provides CPD and is an open and free resource for those clinical teachers that teach in the South East of Scotland. Undertaking CPD is mandatory for all clinical supervisors, since 2012 when the GMC made this a requirement. The CEP used to have a large range of workshops which have now been changed into courses, so there are less topics, but with more depth. The courses also have more of an online learning element to them with course work and a live session with the tutors to discuss the resources.
The openness of resources is one element the programme has been struggling with recently, while in the process of reorganising the curriculum. Due to complications with access for some of the participants, who don’t necessarily have access to the University systems, the question of where to make the resources for the courses available was a difficult one to answer. The resources are licensed by the University and copyrighted by the CEP itself, but should they be shared with everyone? We created a Wiki on the University pages which enables us to add participants who need access to the materials, but this proved quite a labour intensive process and therefore not feasible. In the end, the choice was made to add the resources to the CEP website itself, which all participants can create their own log in for. This way, the materials were accessible to everyone taking part in CEP, although the down side of this set up is that access is given to all the courses at once. It seems that openness has been achieved from this perspective, within the confines of the available options we have in our institution.
Although the programme promotes openness in the sense that it is for anyone, this is obviously narrowed down quite considerably by the parameters within which the teaching is offered; it is a CPD programme for clinical teachers within a specific area; South East Scotland. This ‘closure’ has been imposed through the way the programme is funded; by local NHS boards and the University as a way to make sure the medical students studying at the Edinburgh Medical School are taught well and it’s teachers are supported. Here the economics influence the availability of the OER (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2018) although not quite in the way it is described in the article; there is money available here, it just isn’t allocated to the programme to support more than this specific group of clinical teachers.
One of the points that struck me as interesting with regards to the CEP in the article by Bayne et al. (2015), was the argument of the restructuring of education as a whole towards a more learner centred approach, described by Biesta (2012) as ‘learnification’. As I have mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I think it is useful to make a distinction between undergraduate and younger learners and postgraduate and adult learners in this respect. The CEP is a CPD programme though, which means that most of the learners are self-selected and do have a high degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy anyway. I think learnification as a development is quite worrying, since education is the backbone of society and we should safeguard the role of the teacher. However, in the case of CPD programmes like the CEP, the learners can expected to be autonomous, which changes the dynamic of the educational process to one where learnification maybe isn’t such a bad thing.
Bayne, S., Knox, J., & Ross, J. (2015). Open education: the need for a critical approach. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), pp. 247-250.
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-49.
Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A., & Trotter, H. (2018). A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 204-224
That’s an interesting example of dilemmas in openness. I suppose a counter question would be why should these materials not be open to anyone interested. I presume the clinical supervisors would need some sort of log-in process to support evidence of CPD (?). I quite like the example of FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education) as described here which is absolutely open, has a developed quality assurance process and is increasingly being formally recognised through, for example, being incorporated in ot the curriculum of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
You make a good point about learnification. Biesta was arguing against a discourse whereby all learning is seen as education and ‘a good thing’ for an individual and that such a discourse erodes opportunities to question what the purpose of education as a collective/ societal endeavour is (and so what is being taught, by whom and why). So a student-centred approach can be compatible with Biesta’s position within a broader understanding of the purpose of this approach as an educational one.