 So how did the video project emerge and what was your intention behind it? The video project came out of the necessity to rethink the way we teach in medical school and specifically in neuroanatomy. It's traditionally a course that is very difficult for the students. There's a lot of content and they're very overwhelmed very quickly. So I wanted to break it up a little bit and give them the content in manageable pieces. So we created nine videos in the first iteration accompanied by about 20 modules for the didactic content. And then we changed the session itself, the lab session, to be more interactive where they could apply their knowledge to clinical scenarios. So a classical flipped classroom kind of approach. But we then went ahead and posted everything on the web for public access and the materials just kind of went viral. They went everywhere. There's a lot of universities now using them. And we've got a lot of hits on YouTube on our videos, which we're of course very proud of. And what was the process of putting the videos and the online resources together? Making digital media is a very long process. So I went into it quite naive, not knowing what it would entail. When we first wrote our script, they were almost written like textbooks. That's what we knew how to do, how to write a lecture or how to write a textbook. But doing a video or a module is completely different and you have to play to the strengths of the medium. So we spent hours and hours in a writer's room going through it over and over again. And actually Zach Rothman from MedIT was instrumental in focusing us on what the medium could do. And so we tried to get it to be interesting for the viewer to have a hook to make it really relatable to them and give them memorable moments that they could always think back to to hook the content off to. And were there any challenges or successes that stood out? The challenges are probably the timeline of production. I mean you have these hours in a writing room where you're working on it. And then when the actual filming comes, you're filming 12 hours a day with a professional crew and you're not filming sequentially. So they're telling you, we're doing this now, which is video three, scene four. And you're just doing it and everything is on a teleprompter and you're presenting the information and then you jump to something else. So you have to just let go of everything during the production days and just follow instructions. Everything has to be done for the production day. You can't change it once you're there. And then the other challenge was really to understand the medium, to really know what would work well on film. And without a team of experienced people, it wouldn't have worked. I think we would have produced something that would have been quite boring. But to really have that creative side come into it as well then stimulated us. So in a way it was a challenge at the beginning and then it turned out to be a great success because once we understood the medium we could start playing with it. And in fact when we did the second season where we basically took the nerves from the central nervous system into the gross anatomy of the body, we had a lot more fun with it because we knew the medium and we knew what would work and how to play with it. And what has been the impacts of this project, especially as it relates to your own teaching and also to student learning? I think the impact has several levels. One for the students, I think it took away their fear of neuroanatomy and it's actually something that's documented in the literature. It's called neurophobia or the fear of medical students for everything that is brain related. And it doesn't just happen in undergraduate courses, it goes all the way into clinical practice where practitioners are kind of scared of symptoms that relate to the brain because they feel they can't deal with them easily. And so I feel that by making it more accessible, by having the content available for students and then post-graduates as well, I'm hoping that we were able to get rid of that neurophobia a little bit and make it more accessible and more understandable for students. Is there a question about open education? What are the benefits of open education more broadly? I think open education is where we have to go. I think it's our social responsibility to do this. I don't think that we can stay in our ivory tower and keep the knowledge to ourselves. It's not within the tradition of what academia or universities are. We've always shared our knowledge and now with digital media it's become easier than ever. Especially when you look at access to post-secondary education worldwide, there are a lot of countries who can't afford to produce media like this. We can't. And so we should share that information and with that facilitate access to post-secondary education for anyone. Can you talk a little bit about your work internationally and what's happening right now? Yeah, so because these videos are accessible everywhere and they kind of went viral I guess a little bit, I've built up a network of collaborators who are also interested in creating digital media for education and in medical education. Specifically in anatomy I guess we kind of all found each other that way. And so we're all working together so that we don't recreate things that other people have already done so that we can actually say, okay, your students are working on something on the heart. We can use that in this way and we can add the following modules or information to it so that we in the end come up with a repository of resources that can be shared for everyone. We're all really passionate about open education and not hiding things behind a firewall or a university access code or something like that so that we can share it with everyone. We've reached out to universities in developing countries to offer collaborating with them as well so that we can form partnerships with groups. Currently we have some contacts in Africa where they are already accessing our online materials and now we're looking at collaborating to create media locally that we can in turn then use here at UBC or at the universities my collaborators come from. And were you speaking at a UN conference or something? Yeah, we presented this project at a conference on development in Namibia in December 2014. Oh, 15, sorry, so let me say that again. We presented this project at a conference in Namibia in December 2015 and this conference was organized by Sanord which is a collaboration between Scandinavian countries and sub-Saharan Africa. And so the idea is that affluent Nordic countries are collaborating with universities that I guess need more access to information and this conference was sponsored in part by the United Nations and really played into their post 2015 agenda so the United Nations had put out an agenda to look at where post-secondary education would go and right now we're looking at the world after 2015 they had a big summit in 2015 to look at how much they had accomplished and now really one of the main foci of this agenda or post 2015 is to have more and more digital information available as open educational resources and so we are actively working on contributing to that for medical undergraduate education to begin with. And just back to open education what do you think the impact is on students, faculty and the institution? I think the impact again has different layers I think the more an institution opens itself to the world the better it is for the institution the more we are aware of the challenges that other universities have and the more we can reach out and really collaborate as partners to work on these more global issues such as access to information and access to education the better it is for everyone. I have a group of students working with me right now on creating these resources it's part of their coursework and they are completely thrilled and empowered by knowing that the material that they create will go beyond UBC that this is actually going to have an impact and I guess change the world in just a little bit. What's your next step but perhaps this project or any other projects or ideas that you have? I think the next step is to really organize the repository and advertise it so that more and more people can have access to it so I guess we're still in that initial growth phase of really putting it out there and making sure that while one people know about it they can access it bugs are taken out of the website making the website more accessible and you know easier to navigate and then as a next step we'll be looking into technologies that will enable us to have students collaborate directly and more but I guess digital classrooms that I mean this is not something I envision next year but I you know in the sort of midterm future I envision UBC students working directly with students in Namibia or Uganda or Argentina learning about the limbic system let's say and they're all sort of collaborating in sort of a digital classroom on that content and do you end up adding more videos or are you? Yes we want to add more videos to really grow that video library so we're currently working on a script for a new video and I'm looking for funding for it and we've got more ideas on how to grow it and make it modular so that it you know doesn't just work in a medical school context but in undergraduate or other health professional context as well so we want to grow that and we want to grow the online modules that accompany that so that's for the didactic component of it and then the next part of it is more working on the application of knowledge component and the collaboration component and I think that's a second step I think our first worry right now is to get the didactic repository that out there and then work on more collaboration tools Do you guys have any other questions? I have one little one that's alright and don't look at me I'll pretend you're asking it Yeah I'm just curious and I don't know if you do Do you have any stories of people using your materials like kind of stories of open that you didn't expect or that are interesting? Yes so I get emails almost every week from around the world from people using these materials and they come from all over the world so I was really surprised and I guess thrilled to get an email from Iraq from somebody in Baghdad who had accessed these videos and was studying with them and had some follow up questions I've received emails from Bangladesh when you look at the hits that the website and the videos get online it's really from all over the world and I think that can fill an institution like UBC with a lot of pride that what we're producing actually has an impact for education everywhere the resources are currently used as a formal part of the curriculum in several countries so it's being used in Amsterdam as part of the medical undergraduate curriculum it's being used in several universities in the United States so the resources are being used by faculty and by students it's often the students who find it and then it kind of goes through the student web they forward these resources to each other and in fact right now when you put your anatomy into Google our website is the first one that comes up so that's I guess kind of a success story of an open education resource I mean in order for these videos to be produced there's a certain amount of resources that are available to you and to the team that may not be available to faculty or in other institutions what do you think are some other ways of engaging with open education that these faculty can engage with open education have also an impact? Yeah, so I think what we produced here were very highly produced high quality videos and they cost a lot of money to produce through we were lucky to have TLEF funding for that but there are a lot of ways to produce media with a lot less money with a lot less resources and in fact some of my collaborators have done that and they've engaged the campus community they've engaged film students to be part of the project they had students in arts come in and help with script writing and then they had students presenting for students and filming it with you know just with regular cameras that everybody has accessible I guess almost on their cell phones now and so they were able to create media very quickly and on a budget which is more accessible to everyone Does that kind of cover what you were thinking about? Yeah That was quick Is there anything you want to add? No, I think that pretty much covers what we've been doing It's a fun project to be part of It really is