This article was originally published in BCcampus.
Renée Anderson is associate teaching professor in the School of Nursing at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and is one of the pioneers of creating nursing open educational resources (OER). She was an early adopter OER in her program and has created some widely adopted resources. She is a wonderful example for faculty and has shared her voyage into OER development with many colleagues over the years. With this BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education, Anderson’s dedication to open education is being recognized.
Renée Anderson
In 2018, Anderson received a grant for OER development from TRU. With this funding, she took the open textbook Clinical Procedures for Safer Patient Care by Glynda Rees Doyle and Jodie Anita McCutcheon at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and adapted it into Clinical Procedures for Safer Patient Care – Thompson Rivers University Edition for the benefit of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program.
Changes included modifying learning objectives and critical thinking exercises, cleaning up broken links, updating vocabulary, inserting new figures, and adding new links and references.
The most significant change in this adapted open textbook is the addition of videos to teach students psychomotor skills, such as changing IV bags and removing surgical staples.
Commercial products either didn’t meet the needs of the School of Nursing or were too costly, and faculty weren’t willing to pass on extra costs to students. Realizing they had the knowledge, skills, and ability to create resources to fulfil the needs of their program — as well as possibly others across the province, country and globe — the School of Nursing faculty and staff got to work and produced a series of several dozen openly licensed nursing videos, linked throughout the book.
Anderson’s adaptation is used widely at TRU. In addition, metrics demonstrate the web book has thousands of visitors per month from Canada, the United States, India, the Philippines and Australia.
In 2020, Anderson published a faculty ancillary resource for the TRU edition containing videos and interactive H5P activities designed to teach nursing students about performing assessments of the health of their patients.
In the TRU community, Anderson is always open to supporting faculty starting their foray into open education. She has shared with others the story of her OER journey in formal settings, such as a panel on OER development at the TRU Teaching Practices Colloquium and at a TRU OER showcase for Open Education Week, both in 2020. Anderson has also spread the word through casual conversations with colleagues at TRU — both inside and outside the School of Nursing — and beyond to her colleagues in the Western Canada Collaborative of Health Sciences Educators Society, many of whom also teach nursing skills.
Anderson credits many people in the TRU community for supporting her and her OER projects. A widespread passion for improving equity through open educational resources has been essential to the success and adoption of these resources.
