Welcome to the sickle cell open education project
This website is one of a number of national open education projects in the UK. The aim of this site is to provide resources and materials that are openly available to use to support the teaching of the medical subjects sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia. This website is structured in the following way:
RESOURCES
Please browse our OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES by subject category from the menu on the left. All our resources are available to view from this site and download. The resources are also often located externally on YouTube and Flickr. All are licensed openly by Creative Commons.
NEWS ARTICLES
The NEWS articles on this front page provide news updates relating to sickle cell and new teaching resources as they become available. You can browse these news articles by using the category menus on the left.
SITE MAP
The SITE MAP located on the top navigation will enable you to browse and search the entire library of open educational resources. The map divided into subject categories e.g. life sciences, social sciences and even arts and law.
MOODLE COURSES
We are starting to package our resources up into short on-line courses via Moodle. Feel free to register to have a look at our new open education courses as they become available.
Related posts:
Viv talks about open education at the Queen’s visit to De Montfort University.
I was delighted to be able to bag a spot to talk about OPEN EDUCATION as part of De Montfort University’s Queen’s Diamond Jubilee visit! This was on Thursday 8th of March and it was quite a challenge being usually accustomed for talking for at least 50 minutes to have to cram everything into just 3 minutes!
Speed was of the essence but I successfully talked about OPEN EDUCATION and how it started, and how it is now spreading around the globe, as academic institutions are opening their doors and sharing their learning materials. I said that the key to opening the doors was the Creative Commons open licence, and explained to the audience of students, staff and visitors, to look out for the CC LOGO on the internet.
I spoke about our THREE OPEN EDUCATION PROJECTS – VAL (Virtual Analytical Laboratory) which started way back in 2008. SCOOTER – this current website – which started in 2009 to support sickle cell education, and this year, our new project HALS OER (Health and Life Science Open Educational Resources) which is releasing all sorts of life science learning materials from biomedical science, to forensic science to midwifery.
In my talk I mentioned my favourite email ever received – from a trash collector in the USA who had visited VAL and looked at our microscope videos and animations. He said he always wanted to know how a microscope worked, and thanked us for the resources. I finished my talk with perhaps our greatest open educational resource of all time – Frank Livingstone’s book on the genetics of haemoglobinopathies. I am so grateful for his daughter Amy to have given us permission to release this book – it is a great endorsement of the OPEN EDUCATION movement and what it represents.
Related posts:
Genetics Resources Frequencies of Hemoglobin Variants
open educational resources – genetics
Image: “Frequencies of Hemoglobin Variants” text book by Frank Livingstone
Creative Commons BY SA.
Author: Level:
Frank B Livingstone Undergraduate or postgraduate healthcare and medicine.
OER Features:
Frequencies of Hemoglobin Variants resource page
OER Description:
Frank B Livingstone (1985) Frequencies of Hemoglobin Variants: Thalassemia, The Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency, G6PD Variants, and Ovalocytosis in Human Populations (New York: Oxford University Press). ISBN: 0-19-503634-4.In this work, the anthropologist Frank B Livingstone demonstrated that there are clines (gradients) of gene frequencies between populations measured at different territorial points at particular moments in time (Livingstone, 1985). For a sociologist, the importance of Livingstone’s work is that in compiling such a global compendium, Livingstone retains the awareness that there is no primordial correspondence between genes in bodies and attachment to a particular territory (see Carter and Dyson, 2011). This is because Livingstone’s classic work (Livingstone, 1958a&b) outlines how sickle cell gene frequencies in populations changed as a result of social practices (slash-and-burn clearances of forested areas; the spread of yam cultivation; the denser concentration of human populations; the compacting of soil through agriculture: all leading to the creation of an ecological niche favouring reproduction of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes).
For the public health specialist, Livingstone’s work illustrates the importance of micro-mapping in public health surveillance because gene frequencies can vary quite substantially across relatively short geographical distances. This is important information for a nation-state, or for a particular administrative region within a nation-state, that needs to be convinced, in health economics terms, that provision of screening and treatment services for sickle cell and thalassaemia should be funded by government. Since sickle cell disease and beta-thalassaemia major are genetic conditions it is often assumed, wrongly, that they cannot therefore be public health issues (but see Atrash and Parker, 2010; Ebrahim et al, 2010). To sample a few thousand people, say for sickle cell trait in a sub-Saharan African country, and to extrapolate carrier rates for a whole country would be inappropriate. Livingstone’s work ascribes carrier prevalence to particular populations, at particular moments, in particular places, sampled in particular ways. As such Livingstone’s work reminds us of the ongoing need to improve the quality of epidemiological data we have on the haemoglobinopathies in order for countries currently less well resourced to plan the response of their health systems to sickle cell disease and to the thalassaemias.
References
Atrash H, Parker CS. (2010) The public health response to blood disorders, American Journal of Preventive Medicine 38(4S):S451-S455.
Carter, R and Dyson, SM (2011) Territory, ancestry and descent: the politics of sickle cell disease, Sociology 45(6):963-976.
Ebrahim SH, Khoja, TAM, Elachola, H, Atrash, HK, Memish, Z, Johnson, A. (2010) Children who come and go: The state of sickle cell disease in resource-poor countries, American Journal of Preventive Medicine 38:(4S) S568-S570.
Livingstone, FB (1958a) Anthropological implications of sickle cell gene distribution in West Africa, American Anthropologist 60 (3): 533-562.
Livingstone, FB (1958b) The distribution of the sickle cell gene in Liberia, American Journal of Human Genetics 10 (1): 33-41.
Simon Dyson, February 2012 United Kingdom
Related posts:
Social Sciences Resource for Sickle Cell Disease
open educational resources – social sciences
Creative Commons BY SA.
Author: Level:
Professor Simon Dyson Undergraduate social sciences and healthcare, postgraduate,
. education and healthcare professionals.
OER Features:
Funding report: Education of young people with sickle cell disease
OER Description:
These open educational resources are perhaps some of our most important. They are the result of a research project funded by the UK Economic & Social Research Council and conducted between De Montfort University, University of York and Loughborough University. The first report provides some essential background information to sickle cell disease, which is a complex condition with symptoms ranging from stroke, silent stroke, chronic pain and acute painful crises.
This research project explored how young people are treated in schools, and as a result, a help guide has been produced which many schools are now using and have adapted to provide support and better care of sickle suffers in their education setting.
Related posts:
Haematology open educational resources
open educational resources – haematology
Creative Commons BY SA.
Author: Level:
Keith Chambers, Undergraduate bioscience,
Leicester Royal Infirmary Postgraduate science.
OER Features:
OER Description:
These haematology open educational resources are images in the form of JPEGs and PNG files comprising of 20 photographs of blood smears for educational use. The pictures were kindly given with permission from the Leicester Royal Infirmary Department of Pathology, and a big thank you to Keith Chambers for working on this part of the project.
The image sets include blood smears from a healthy adult, blood smears from a neonate and smears of sickle cell disease.