2006-11-03, Royal College of General Practitioners, London

This was a golden opportunity to listen to and mingle with the nation's eLearning experts. 

Michael Bannon, the overall Dean for South Central (the health region formed of Oxford and part of the old Wessex region)  gave the first lecture entitled "Drivers behind the expansion of e-Learning in the NHS at what cost?" He made a point that was reiterated by many of the subsequent speakers, namely that e-learning was vital to the NHS, both for delivering better quality learning and for reducing the cost of providing education.

From an open source perspective, the most captivating lecture was from John Sandars, Senior Lecturer in Community Based Learning at University of Leeds. Sandars is a gifted and entertaining lecturer, with a good grasp of current web-based technology and how this relates to eLearning...

• http://www.med.leeds.ac.uk/medstaff/person.asp?id=3
  

He discussed "web 2.0", wikis, podcasts, open source & much of the technology we are already using at here at DEOSS. Sandars is a professional educator who has a good handle on what's really going on in the world of eLearning. Obvously ruffling the feathers of some of the other speakers, Sandars projected his somewhat radical views in a sharp, witty and convincing manner, without resorting to the usual committee-speak. At the end of his lecture, I asked Sandars if he felt that the conventional NHS IT hierarchy was unhelpful, obstructive and in some respects irrelevant to e-learning? Bit of a shocker: he said "yes"!!!

Shame he had to leave early, before I could talk to him further.

Talking over lunch to various delegates I found a lot interest in the DEOSS/open source concept. I was surprised to find that many delegates had not even heard of open source packages such as Moodle. Nevertheless, the idea of bypassing unhelpful or obstructive NHS IT departments appeared to be quite popular amongst those actually trying to create effective eLearning systems. Whilst my evidence is purely anecdotal, it seems it is not only Sandars who believes that eLearning has to be be developed outside the constraints of the conventional NHS IT structure.

The conference was sponsored by commercial medical eLearning providers 123DOC, http://www.123doc.com