Practice-based professional education (nursing, medicine, social work, etc.) involves the learning of core skills and competencies as well as knowledge and theory. Where textbooks may be the most commonly used educational resource in traditional academic disciplines, practice-based professions use a variety of educational resources to teach skills and competencies. This is an opportunity for educators to expand beyond open textbooks to create learning resources that can be used by a wide variety of students and educators.
As social work educators teaching a BSW level communication course, we use demonstration and simulation to teach critical communication skills. We found that there were very few good demonstration videos of basic communication skills relevant to social work practice. Consequently we created our own and licensed the resource as an open educational resource for use by others.
In this session we will describe our rationale and process for creating an accessible, toolkit of demonstration videos for teaching communication skills in social work. The toolkit consists of five short counselling vignettes demonstrating core communication skills, student and instructor transcripts and a teaching guide for using these videos to teach communication skills. We will describe how we used this resource in both face to face and online teaching during the pandemic. We hope to inspire others educators to create OER's beyond the textbook.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Describe the benefit of using open educational resources in teaching and learning for practice based professions
- Describe how demonstration videos can enhance learning of communication skills in both online and f2f environments
- Describe the process and considerations for creating accessible, multimedia OER's
- Locate an OER for teaching communication skills in social work
