Good Practice Professional Community SAMEN hbo-verpleegkunde (nursing).

Dorine Koopman, project leader at Saxion University of Applied Sciences and community manager of HBO SAMEN hbo-verpleegkunde (nursing): 'We are a learning network of teachers for the nursing profession in the Netherlands. There are 15 universities of applied sciences participating in the SAMEN project, working together to develop and share learning materials in Wikiwijs. The success of our professional community is closely linked to our communication platform, hbovpk.nl, which is a social intranet. It was built by an external supplier and its aim is to share knowledge, news and experiences. This is where we highlight what has been made. The best advertisement for open educational resources is to see them in action.

If you start a community and say, "Let's collaborate", nothing will happen. What does work is to name some themes. We have identified fifteen themes that all universities of applied sciences are all dealing with in their own way, from the use of technology in education to giving education an international dimension. Many collaborative initiatives come about because we created some theme pages on the platform website. For each theme, we then look for content specialists from two or three universities of applied sciences and bring them together. The description of the assignment to create new learning materials is fairly general: work together to investigate what is needed and create it.

By developing learning materials together, you will get to know each other, and this will make collaboration in other areas easier too. For example, each university of applied sciences is now facing the question of how to organise practical lessons during the Covid pandemic. Members of the professional community are now sharing protocols and fact sheets.

Our organisation consists of a core team of 7 people and a project group with representatives from all participating institutions. We have appointed a project leader, a community manager and an adviser. We come together once every six weeks. The core team establishes the broader parameters. What will be shared and what learning materials are needed will be discussed with the project group. We evaluate our quality model for developing learning materials. We are continually aware of the community building aspects too: can we do anything else to improve? You have to keep the momentum going, keep involving people and keep reminding them of the objective.'

All educational resources from this community are shared on hbo-vpk.wikiwijs.nl. In addition, you can find all these resources in edusources with the search term hbovpk.