OPENPediatrics Open Sources Medical Diagrams and Animations

Steve CarsonOPENPediatrics (OP), a free online education and best practice sharing community for pediatric clinicians worldwide, has launched a new library of openly licensed medical animations and illustrations, making them available for non-commercial educational use. The new multimedia library draws on the extensive collection of animations and illustrations developed for didactic and procedural videos created for the OP clinician community site.

Previously, these resources were only available embedded within OP videos and simulators, but are now presented in a searchable library that includes downloadable versions of each resource. “Our mission is to improve the health of children worldwide through innovative uses of educational technology,” said program director Jeffrey Burns, chief of Critical Care at Boston Children’s Hospital. “By using the web to distribute animations and illustrations we’ve created for our clinician videos and simulations, we are making them available to an even wider audience and in a format allowing for a wide range of novel uses.”

The initial 48 animations and illustrations are among the hundreds that will eventually be made available. The first set of resources illustrates key concepts of airway management, respiratory care, neurology, clinical procedures, and other areas of pediatric care. As with all OPENPediatrics resources, the animations and illustrations have been peer reviewed for accuracy. All resources in the collection are made available under a Creative Commons license that permits users to download, modify and redistribute the images for non-commercial purposes.

In the coming months, OPENPediatrics will continue publishing animations and illustrations from its back catalog as well as from newly released videos and other resources. The multimedia library is the second publicly available resource from OPENPediatrics, joining a collection of World Shared Practice Forum videos, which share global perspectives on key aspects of pediatric care.

OPENPediatrics recently joined the Open Education Consortium, the worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education and its impact on global education. The OEC includes open education pioneers including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The Open University (UK), and TU Delft (Netherlands).