Open Osmosis: Library of Open Educational Resources (OER) for Medical Education

Abstract

Many resources currently available for graduate and undergraduate medical education are fragmented, difficult to access, and costly. Osmosis, a web- and mobile-based platform, was developed to create a shared and easily accessible repository of curated clinical educational resources. We have recently launched “Open Osmosis” - a public-facing portal that has become one of the largest databases of Creative Commons-licensed questions, among other open educational resources (OER), for medical education. Initially created for use at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Osmosis spread to recruit and involve medical students, physicians, and clinical content advisors from dozens of countries and hundreds of institutions. These individuals have served various roles, including as question-writers (“Medical Contributors”), content organizers (“Medical Scholars”), and expert reviewers (“Clinical Advisors”). Here we describe our experience developing Open Osmosis as a case study for crowdsourcing medical education content, and to comment on potential future development of this platform.

Innovate and Educate

“…These resources are growing every day in what topics are available, as well as the availability of different types of resources (questions, books, videos, etc). Some of the current areas that are covered by OER are obstetrics and gynecology, osteopathic principles, pediatrics, psychiatry, anatomy and physiology, radiology, spine and musculoskeletal, emergency medicine, neurology, and surgery 6. Depending on the type of OER, it may be an option for assessing their learners' competencies, which assists in finding innovative ways to evaluate whether students are competent.…”