The Nordic University Health Hub
The Nordic University Health Hub is a Nordic collaboration for accessing and sharing digital teaching resources.
Led by the University of Copenhagen, it has a web-based platform for sharing educational resources. Since October 2018, universities from the Nordic region have been sharing so-called Open Educational Resources, OER, with an initial focus on global health. OER is a common term for digital educational materials, such as videos, photos, animations, articles, cases, essay questions and educational datasets, all of which are available to everyone, just like scientific articles published as Open Access, OA.
The Nordic University Health Hub meets two challenges in particular:
- Many teachers do not have the time or financial resources to develop teaching materials themselves
- Individual universities may not be equally strong in all subject areas
Therefore, direct access to educational materials from different partners has the potential to enhance the quality of the individual institution. At the same time, the transition from traditional lectures to more active learning, typically combining face-to-face teaching with online activities, can optimise the use of resources.
The fact that there are many similarities between the different universities involved in the Nordic project makes it easier to match materials to their own needs - and even better if more Nordic partners join in.
OER promotes active learning
In addition to sharing materials, the Nordic University Health Hub offers the opportunity to collaborate on developing materials, methods and joint teaching activities. This form of co-creation, based on OER, is called Open Educational Practice (OEP) and can be done, for example, by teachers improving and updating each other's materials and sharing the latest version on the platform.
The Hub also offers a so-called LTI integration, allowing teachers to integrate material directly from the Hub into their own university's LMS, such as Studium.
All the material on the Nordic University Health Hub is registered as OER with a Creative Commons or public domain license, which guarantees teachers' copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute and use and adapt the material in selected ways.
OER in steady global growth
The Nordic University Health Hub is hosted on the global platform www.oercommons.org, where you can also find materials from many other private and public institutions, such as the universities of MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. The OER Commons has been around since 2007 when educators from around the world gathered in Cape Town and issued the so-called Capetown Open Education Declaration. Since then, the use of OER has grown steadily, according to the OECD, and has influenced education systems and policies in many places.