Platform Neutral Clinical Support & Coordination
The ongoing challenge for multi-user collaboration across independent organizations, as well as the cost and effort of maintaining collaborative resources has long been a barrier for educators, clinical partners, and students.
Students have Learning Management systems that allow them to freely communicate with their instructors about course materials. Instructors and clinical mentors communicate largely through emails. Students and clinical mentors communicate largely in-person, during their day-to-day learning. And while mechanisms for group communication and coordination do exist, they are cumbersome and imperfect.
The Open EdTech Collective at https://opened.ca/ seeks to make technology for education more collaborative and accessible to everyone. The OpenETC is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the BC post-secondary sector. This site is hosted free through the OpenETC and is collaboratively maintained by the Camosun College Sonography Program Faculty.
The site is set up in a “blog” style. Instructors can use the News Feed to create posts that can be viewed and accessed by students, clinical mentors, workplace managers, and members of the public. Site visitors can submit questions and comments to the News Feed posts and site moderators will publish and sometimes respond to comments. Static reference pages will provide access to current clinical documents, forms, and curriculum materials to enable workplace mentors and clinical liaisons to provide collaborative support.
