Adaptation and Deployment of OER for Communicating Scientific Research Findings in Health Sciences Education

Project TitleAdaptation and Deployment of OER for Communicating Scientific Research Findings in Health Sciences Education
Principal InvestigatorMohammad Ehsanul Karim
Co-ApplicantsSuborna Ahmed, Assistant Professor of Teaching (tenure-track), Department of Forest Resources Management,
Fardowsa Yusuf, 3rd year Ph.D. student, SPPH
FacultyMedicine
Funding Year2021
Project SummarySPPH 504-007 is a required Ph.D. level UBC credit course for SPPH students. One of the components of this course has a focus on scientific communication. Specifically, communicating with the scientific community about an epidemiological study that has been designed to answer a particular health research question and appropriately interpreting the study results. Students write a research article suitable for submission to an academic peer- reviewed health journal for publication. However, a general challenge of teaching scientific communication is that most of the associated teaching materials and references are either overly general (not discipline-specific, do not take into account applications to healthcare), or not openly accessible (expensive textbooks). Also, SPPH students have varying academic backgrounds, and many are not familiar with new scientific writing collaboration tools that (i) are helpful for managing collaborative projects and (ii) can aid in conducting reproducible research. This OER project will allow us to make the course content open to other UBC health researchers who struggle with scientific writing and introduce them to tools that will help them manage collaborative group research projects. The project aims to create and share openly accessible high-quality OER content through a step-by-step educational guide on how to write scientific articles for peer-reviewed journals, with a specific focus on communicating with the health research community. Specific topics include: 1. Scientific writing basics, components of a good research question 2. Writing the ‘Introduction’ section, identifying a gap in the literature 3. Writing the ‘Methods’ section, describing the data sources/collection, study design, and statistical analysis 4. Presenting tables and figures, and writing the ‘Results’ section 5. Writing the ‘Discussion’ section, interpreting results, stating the implications, strengths and limitations of the study, and future research 6. Introducing tools for managing collaborative scientific writing projects and reproducible research (e.g., RMarkdown, GitHub).
Project PosterOER for Effective Scientific Communication in Health Sciences
Link to OERhttps://ehsanx.github.io/Scientific-Writing-for-Health-Research/
Grant type OER Rapid Innovation
Funded Amount $2,000

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