e-Learning within a Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE)

Abstract

CORE is a JISC-funded project to develop and deploy a service enabling orthopaedic surgeons to collaborate in the design, analysis, and dissemination of experiments. Higher surgical trainees (HSTs) are qualified surgeons training to be consultants. They are not computer specialists, their study is work based, and they rarely are co-located with other HSTs. During the six years of training they usually move post twelve times while maintaining an e-portfolio of their work. They typify both the individual scientist collaborating on a project with others and a group of e learners studying in a collaborative partner institution. Using a services oriented architecture (SOA) and informed by the Web services of the e-Learning Framework (ELF), CORE will provide a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) demonstrator which is a development of the EU-funded Virtual University for Orthopaedics (VOEU). The architecture for CORE builds on recent work in the EPSRC-funded myGrid and MIAKT projects. The myGrid project focuses on the issues of storage, computation, and resource management in the provision of Web services, and the MIAKT project develops and deploys ontology, annotation, and enrichment services within a medical context. These services are brought together in CORE to assist HSTs in the co-ordination and running of “Virtual Bone Laboratory” experiments, in the collection, analysis, and reporting of the results, and in the maintenance of their e-portfolios. This paper reports on the SOA design for CORE, and in particular for a CORE component called the “Virtual Bone Laboratory”, a virtual learning environment (VLE) tailored to the particular requirements of the orthopaedic community. The paper reports on the identification, selection, development and deployment of the Web services needed to support an orthopaedic surgeon within this tailored VLE, and offers comment on the SOA approach to the development of VLEs more generally.

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ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

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