A medical student created an open online anatomy textbook called TeachMeAnatomy in his spare time using a crowd-sourced and peer-reviewed model. Over time, the site grew significantly in popularity and views. It became financially sustainable through advertisements. The student was able to ensure quality by starting with content from friends and moving to an open crowd-sourcing model with comments and ratings. The site had a major impact with views increasing over 30 times from 2013 to 2016. It provides a profitable and reproducible model for other open educational initiatives.
TeachMeAnatomy: How a medical student built a sustainable, crowd-sourced, peer-reviewed, open online textbook in his spare time
1. TeachMeAnatomy:
How a medical student built a sustainable, crowd-
sourced, peer-reviewed, open online textbook in his
spare time
Terese Bird and Ollie Jones
Leicester Medical School
OER16 Conference, Edinburgh, 19 April 2016
2. A model of a successful openish-to-open initiative
3.
4.
5. History of Open and Openish Educational Initiatives
(ICDE, 2010) (Pearce, 2012) (Weller, 2015)
2001 MIT Open
Courseware,
Creative
Commons
2002 “OER”
term used
UNESCO Forum
2006
OpenLearn
(Hewlett
Foundation)
2008 Capetown
Declaration
2010 Jorum
2012 Coursera,
FutureLearn
2005
Youtube
2006
Khan
Academy
2007
iTunes U
2008
App Store
2004
Flickr
2001
Wikipedia
6. Why and how
Arose from a clear user need
• Responsive design
• Undergraduate level
• Free
9. How to ensure and improve quality
• How to make sure the written articles are correct before there is a
crowd to crowdsource:
• Start with friends, move to the crowd
• Allow comments
• Leicester Medical School stance
• Spinoff sites are being vetted by
by senior clinical practitioners
Image courtesy of Adrienne Yancey on Flickr
18. Conclusions and considerations
• Satisfies a clear need
• Community to Crowd-source
• Content
• Quality
• Ratings and comments
• Commercial
• Openish to open
A profitable & reproducible model for open initiatives
Image by Msannakoval on
Wikimedia
19. References
• ICDE (2010) ‘Open Educational Practices » Open Educational Quality
Initiative - OPAL’, ICDE Website, [online] Available from:
http://www.icde.org/en/resources/open_educational_practices/Ope
n+Educational+Quality+Initiative+-+OPAL.9UFRzW5W.ips (Accessed 5
November 2015).
• Pearce, N. (2012) Developing students as OER content scavengers,
[online] Available from: http://www8.open.ac.uk/score/developing-
students-oer-content-scavengers.
• Weller, M. (2015) Webinar on impact of Open Education - Findings
from the OER Research Hub, Online United Kingdom.
20. Questions? Get in touch!
• Terese Bird t.bird@le.ac.uk
• Ollie Jones oj12@student.le.ac.uk
teachmeanatomy.info
Hinweis der Redaktion
The need for TeachMeAnatomy became apparent to me when I was in my first year of medicine. I, like many other students, mostly use the internet for my revision. I was looking for a text-based anatomy resource at a level suitable for medical students – but couldn’t find one. So – the answer was to make one myself! The aims were fairly basic – an electronic resource, with the content at undergraduate level, which was free to use.
From the outset, it was not meant to be a commercial venture, nor was it really intended to be a resource for those outside the medical school.
Also should note that I had no concept of open access, creative commons licensing, or copyright before this point. I only learnt about them as I encountered them.
How?
Putting stuff on WordPress
Adapting old grays images
Got friends to help write and vet content, recruited via facebook
The site has been running since February 2012. This graph displays daily page views from March 2013 (when we started to collect visitor statistics) to March 2016.
Consistent growth year on year, with dips over the academic holidays.
Total number of views since the site has been running is just over 15 million. Overall has been used for 390,000 hours.
We conducted a demographic survey last year to identify what sorts of individuals use TeachMeAnatomy.
Surprised to note that medical students - who the site was designed for – only make up 27% of the user base.
A map of where site users come from (data from March 1st 2013 – March 1st 2016).
Countries with many visitors are displayed in dark blue – the top five countries are USA (33%), UK (17%), Australia (8%), India (6%) and Canada (4%).
Countries with no visitors are white – such as Western Sahara.
Light blue countries are somewhere in between.
This map shows that site users can be found in almost every country in the world.
Initially looked at whether could use images under fair use law. Wasn’t sure.
Then looked at whether I could use images under a non-commercial CC license – again wasn’t sure.
For someone very new to copyright rules, very confusing to work out what you can and cannot use.
There are three different types of material on TeachMeAnatomy:
Original content – content that we have produced ourselves. It includes all of the written material and some of the images, which we hand-drawn.
Public domain – content that we have adapted from material on the public domain. This mainly applies to illustrations
Non commercial creative commons license.
There are no medical illustrators/graphic designers on the website, so we could not use images under public domain/CC, then we wouldn’t have any.
When talking about open use, must acknowledge wordpress, which is a fantastic open source platform for content heavy websites
Whilst all the original material on the site in licensed under a creative commons license, if a teacher wants to use the content under different terms, we usually grant permission. Have had over 100 image use requests, and have only declined permission once.
University of Buckingham – used images from the site in lectures and coursework.
NAACCR – used images in powerpoint presentations for webinars
Oxford university – used images to create their own private resource on their VLE
Ossur UK – a company that produces prostheses, used images to help train non-medical staff.
To ensure sustainability, one of the key aspects was to ensure engagement of our users.
Last year, I added a rating and comment box to every page on the site. This allows the user to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback on the material. This increased the volume of feedback we received dramatically. We make changes to the site based on the feedback in about 60% of cases. This means that the resource becomes more accurate and more tailored to the user base as time goes on.
I don’t think it would be possible to make the project sustainable in this way if it was not for the open-access and ‘community’ spirit of the resource.
Revenue is generated via non-intrusive advertising. This allows all the content to be open access, whilst still have funds to further develop the website. Not restrictive – you don’t need to pay to access any extra content.
To date, we’ve used these funds to develop mobile applications, build new websites, and even sponsor the medics sports teams at Leicester.
Generated £40,000 last tax year.
