PARTICIPATION AND PARTNERSHIPS IN TRANSNATIONAL OPEN CONTENT DEVELOPMENT

Background
Transnational shared content development and use is not easy to achieve due to the very significant practical and philosophical barriers it represents. For a project to be successful it must fundamentally grounded in the concept of a Community of Practice (Wenger, 2011) in which there are shared ideals and actions and true and meaningful participation of all members. In order to support this we have adopted a model based on a Participatory Design (PD) approach to learning resource creation (Kensing and Bloomberg, 1998) in an EU-funded project called TransCoCon that is aiming to develop shared content about the patient’s journey through the healthcare system from five national partners . September 2017 saw the inauguration of the strategic partnership of five higher education institutions from Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Nottingham working in cooperation to create innovative accessible resources that will enable undergraduate nursing students to develop knowledge and skills that enable self-efficacy to influence direct patient care. Nurse Educators, students and stakeholders come together to develop five Re-usable Learning Objects (RLOs) for Transcultural collaboration and competence in Nursing (TransCoCon). The implementation of the RLOs will strengthen the quality in our cooperation as a whole as well as partners' educational programmes. In continuous vocational education, TransCoCon will integrate learning and content such as national health and social systems in the participating countries, relevant European regulations, national issues such as professional licensing and registration as well as professional identity and role. The project will build the foundation for future use of these RLOs and development of further RLOs within and beyond this network by introducing an evidence based accessible participatory approach to development. Aim: Here we reflect on the Participatory Design approach to learning resource creation and its application to transnational stakeholders.
Method: The development framework used in the project was based on the ASPIRE development framework created at the University of Nottingham. The first steps in this process brings all participants together in a workshop to scope the project and then storyboard the resources. Storyboarding involved the use of large A0 laminated sheets and the coming together in small teams of 5-6 to create designs around these storyboards. Results: During the presentation, we will show the variety of outputs from the workshops including discussions, storyboards and ways of working. Initial results of the project show the richness of the discussion that has been generated through the storyboarding process, and how this process in itself helps in the creation and cohesion of a community of practice. Reflections on the process show the complexity of working on shared content across national boundaries and languages, but also illustrate the creative ways in which individuals address these challenges.
Conclusion/recommendations: During the presentation we will also demonstrate the online collaborative storyboarding tool that has been developed and deployed for the purposes of this project.