Effective knowledge enhancement is an increasingly important factor in the education of health professionals.
Explosive growth of information in all areas of medicine demands a lot of time of both faculty and students. This has generated a need for systems that can simplify access to a diverse range of information resources and also facilitate the effective use of this information.
TUSK, The Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase at http://ocw.tufts.edu/, is a dynamic multimedia knowledge management system for health professionals. It is truly an outstanding gateway to an integrated body of knowledge.
It is also a means to personally organise the vast array of health information through its related applications.
Integration is fostered by allowing faculty and students access to data across courses, schools and years with the functionality to link appropriate data from all the courses.
A student can maintain access to all courses as he or she progresses through the curriculum. He or she can also be the master of his or her own learning by both creating and annotating folders and content in personally meaningful ways.
Begun in 1995, it serves all Tufts health science schools and programs including the Medical, Dental and Veterinary Schools. A virtual treasure trove the website provides free access to the syllabus, calendar, lectures, and slides for a variety of courses, primarily in the health sciences.
Among the courses listed under Medical School are Addiction Medicine, Biochemistry, Cell, Tissue and Organ Biology, Clinical Anatomy, Immunology, Nutrition and Medicine, Molecular Biology, Physical Diagnosis - Clinical skills and Clinical cases, Physiology, Epidemiology and Biostastics, and General Pathology.
The courses listed under Dental School include - Biomaterials, Cranio Facial function, Dental Anatomy, Ethics and Professionalism in Dentistry, Histology, Microbiology/Oral Health Promotion, Introduction to Clinical Experience and Operative Dentistry.
Under the Sackler School heading, the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences enrolls doctoral candidates in the basic biomedical sciences, these courses are offered - Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Clinical Research, Genetics, Immunology, Integrated Studies Programme, Molecular Microbilogy, Neuroscience, Pharmocology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Access is also provided to course materials related to these degrees - Master of Public Health, and Master of Science in Health Communication.
TUSK contains over 1,50,000 pieces of content. Its features include schedule display, with blocks linked to relevant content, on-line quizzes and evaluations, comprehensive content management system allowing content/metadata upload and course management tools and importantly the ability to reuse existing content in new contexts, indexing using the NLM's Unified Medical Language System, and XML marked up text displaying the semantic meaning of the content (for example there are tags to denote keywords, nuggets, topic sentences and the like).
TUSK features integrated course materials such as lecture notes, anatomical illustrations, current journal articles, course syllabi, quizzes, audio and visual learning tools, course schedules and student course evaluations. New tools under construction include a case based tool for teaching and learning including a faculty authoring and student.
The software architecture of the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase is built using open source software.
The architecture was constructed to facilitate content integration, student interaction with content and knowledge management. In 2001, TUSK was awarded the prestigious CIO Enterprise Value Award. This was the first time the award had ever been granted to a university.
Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) is currently used by Tufts' Medical, Veterinary, Dental and Nutrition Schools as well as three African, one Indian, and three United States medical schools.
TUSK is part of Tufts University's OpenCourseWare, provides free access to course content for everyone, online. To access the course materials no registration is required. Though no access is provided to Tuffts faculty, feedback is shared.
