2024 UT System Momentum on Open Educational Resources (MOER) Convening "Lightning Talk": "FAIR and Open Scholastic and Curricular Materials: Towards an “OER Descriptor” for Federally-Funded UT Medical Education Programs"

Presentation for the University of Texas System Momentum on Open Educational Resources (MOER) Convening, by Dr. Fuller, scheduled for live delivery on 2024-11-18T1045, at the UT System Building, 210 W. 7th Street, Austin TX, USA.

"Lightning Talks" consist of a 5-slide/5-minute format.

Precis:

The advent of open educational resources (OER) necessitates a movement towards rigorous informatics formats to facilitate dissemination and reuse of open access/open license public materials. The 2007 Cape Town Declaration designates that public/tax-payer funded educational materials (e.g. curriculum; written, audio and video course materials; evaluative measure; program data and outcome metrics) should be considered as OER, and said "Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms.." Moreover, the current lack of formalized machine/human-readable informatics standards for the description and cataloging of OERs necessitates significant end-user effort in order to locate, access, and reuse publicly available materials. Leveraging a conceptual isotype, the "Data Descriptor", which allows data to be "published" in an encapsulated format analogous to the tradiational scientific manuscript, and informed from the development of open access practices with regard to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) practices developed from the FORCE 11 Amsterdam manifesto, we seek to define the concept of "Curricular Descriptor". The Curricular Descriptor is envisioned as a publishable formatted description of an educational program, with embedded digital object identifiers that enable indexing and dissemination of subcomponent (meta)data. These Curricular Descriptor could conceivably be published and cited in the same manner as both Data Descriptors and scientific publications, allowing ready citation, enabling (re)use, and facilitating/incentivizing OER public deposition. Using the MD Anderson Medical Library OpenWorks platform for Curricular Descriptor deposition, (meta)data storage of permanent digital materials, and indexing, we describe a potential pilot for oncology education OERs as prototyping and implementation use-case.