Options for Packaging/Organizing our Education Resources

Community
1

Hi everyone!

Last month, the Academy Squad started talking about different options for packaging and making the Fundamentals Academy material available. During our last two squad calls, a few things became clear:

  • There is a variety of material that we can make available: slides, videos, formal curricula, etc.
  • Different people use materials differently:
    • new community members are looking for materials to help them learn and grow;
    • implementers might be looking for the Fundamentals course so that they can deliver it in their setting;
    • facilitators are looking for particular content to integrate into their course.

The bottom line: We need to package our materials in a smart way that makes it easy for people to find the materials that best suit their needs. A lot of great ideas came up during our squad meeting, which have come together into three options for two kinds of users (facilitators/implementers and individual learners):

Possible packages for facilitators/implementers

:bulb:OpenMRS Fundamentals Academy.™ In terms of materials, this consists of Facilitator’s Guide/curriculum, slide deck, preparation checklist, and certificate signed by OpenMRS. The Fundamentals Academy is also about accessing the squad’s support tailoring the curriculum, engaging community subject matter experts and experienced facilitators (eventually certified ones?). The squad is already talking about developing and publishing a checklist to guide this process.

:bulb:OpenMRS Training Material Library. Similar to Open Educational Resource Commons, the idea is to make basic slides, assignments, readings, videos available to facilitators, curriculum developers/instructional designers, and/or subject matter experts. Instead of organizing them into modules, guides, or curricula, we simply have folders on topics or themes where relevant materials and resources can be filed. Educators who want to include a particular topic (ie: OpenMRS quality assurance) but not a whole course have access to materials about that topic. We can encourage people who use these materials to upload any updated materials to help us keep the materials up to date and integrate real life examples.

Possible package for individual learners

:bulb:OpenMRS Technical Pathways. This idea is inspired by the Google Tech Dev Guide and the work that @k.joseph @ibacher @mozzy and I have been doing to update our dev stages. The idea? We use our dev, community engagement, QA, and other stages to define competency areas, learning objectives, and then organize and gather readings, videos, assignments, practical activities, projects, etc to align with the right competency.

We want your feedback! Tell us what you think about these packages - and if they trigger any new ideas for us to consider.

1 Like
2

Final call for feedback! Please share your opinions, suggestions for improvement, or new ideas for packaging our education resources here or at our next Academy squad meeting (next Thursday, 25 February).

The squad would like to start getting the Knowledge Center page on our Wiki ready with information on one (or more ) of these packages.

3

This sounds really nice Jen, thanks for sharing this. I like both the possible packages for facilitators/implementers. Having highlighted, explicitly endorsed Fundamentals courses makes sense, and so does having a broader library of training materials. It reminds me of how DHIS2 has structured their Academy content:

image
image1674Ă—546 52.8 KB

I think the missing piece for me at the moment is: If a person is an individual contributor, where do they go to learn through synchronous venues, other than asynchronous ones (e.g. in-person workshops or online webinars etc)? E.g. Schedule of upcoming trainings, list of training programs in different regions. (Though this doesn’t feel like a requirement for the first round of academy materials.)

1 Like
4

Thanks for sharing the DHIS2 example, @grace

About synchronous opportunities for individuals, yes, that might be further in the future. For now the squad agreed that we could provide support to implementers and others who want to deliver the courses, as we’re not organizing and delivering them ourselves. Once we have a sustainable way of delivering the Fundamentals Academy, @antoniomacheve suggested that we could have a “Register” option on the Wiki (or better yet, website) for people who wanted to take it.

Another option is to have something like the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition’s LAPTOP, a course-finder database. Today, it has a nice search function and a way for groups to add courses - and it originally started out as a simple spreadsheet of courses that a few people set up as they surveyed existing training courses for supply chain managers (funded through an early Gates Grand Challenge). Since many implementers conduct OpenMRS trainings, this kind of tool could capture those country-level opportunities. If we wanted to make that a part of our Knowledge Center, then we’d need to figure out who would create the database of trainings and who would maintain it.