KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Box 1: The OERC Mission Statement
and classifying educational materials from leading cancer
institutions and organizations, and 3) seeking cancer teaching
To enhance knowledge sharing on cancer control strategies with
modules in multiple formats, such as Power Point lectures,
a focus on developing countries.
course syllabi, monographs, videos, etc. MERLOT (Multimedia
‰ To expand and enhance capacity of physicians, nurses and Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching),
care givers in developing countries to treat cancer patients. (www.merlot.org), the well established and proven open
‰ To act on the current WHO recommendation for knowledge resource application of the California State University System,
sharing on cancer. agreed to host and develop a site for the metadata collection
‰ To provide high quality didactic materials to cancer repository of cancer education materials and to establish a
educators in easily accessible formats at no cost on a section devoted to cancer education to which cancer educator
worldwide scale. in medicine, nursing and other disciplines could easily
‰ To make available latest clinical trials information to cancer contribute didactic modules. Thus, a new “cancer education
care providers and patients. community” was established as part of the MERLOT online
‰ To contribute to the development of a research health professionals group and the acquisition and accessing
infrastructure and a research ethos for cancer prevention of teaching materials began.
and care at a global level. The OERC website, www.oerc.merlot.org was announced at
the INCTR annual meeting in Antalya, Turkey, and launched
small, interdisciplinary working group of committed online in July 2009. The OERC website, hosted by MERLOT,
individuals (later to become the OERC Executive Committee) now provides free access and easy discovery of an online
began to design an online repository of cancer education collection of donor contributed, categorized cancer
modules selected to aid educators in low- resource countries educational materials (lectures, clinical guides, course
to develop curricula and teaching programmes tailored to the curricula, videos, research summaries, patient education
specific needs of their learners and local environment. modules etc.). OERC is currently continuing to build the open
Materials were solicited from cancer centres in USA and online library to allow no-cost access to educational materials
Europe, to be made easily accessible at no cost to medical contributed by the worldwide community of clinical and basic
teachers anywhere, anytime. cancer professionals. These teaching modules are intended
After a year of concerted effort, an affiliation between for and made available to education and training of health
OERC and INCTR was developed to begin to define the cancer care professionals and students, as well as patients, families
educational needs of low-income countries. Development of and the public.
the educational repository proceeded by 1) establishing In building the collection of open educational resources, the
cancer taxonomy outline, 2) soliciting, collecting, reviewing, OERC set goals of having the collection be free of cost, with
permission to freely use the materials, and
Figure 1: The OERC website
to provide both quality and utility
resources to the user community. The
Creative Commons© policy was selected
to serve as the guide to intellectual
property matters and explicitly grant to
users permission to use all or part of their
offerings with appropriate attribution.
The OERC collection will be leveraging
MERLOT’s strategy for providing users
assurance of quality and utility of the
resources. As OERC continues to build its
collection and community of users, we will
establish an editorial board for conducting
peer reviews of the collection. MERLOT
has an established methodology for
peer reviewing materials that it has
deployed for the past 10 years which
164 CANCER CONTROL 2013