During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

October 20 , 2006

Medical Information Websites
The Top 5

Rotator cuff tear
WebMD video

A popular kind of open content online is provided by websites with medical information. A Google search in October 2006 for "medical information" resulted in a list with the following five websites at the top, listed here in the order given by Google:

WebMD (a proprietary website)
MedlinePlus (a US government website)
Mayo Clinic (a private medical clinic)
MedicineNet (a publishing company)
Merck Manual (provided by the Merck & Co., a global pharmaceutical company)

From any one of the five sources—and most certainly from the five sources in combination—comprehensive and authoritative medical information is available for anyone online at no cost. These materials can also serve as open educational resources. They can either be viewed and explored directly by students or they can be use in part or completely as lesson materials. Why would an educator want to go to the trouble to make an expensive new illustration of tears in a rotator cuff when the one shown above is available at now cost?

The illustration above is found in a WebMD video. That website has a large number of top quality videos on many different medical subjects.

But even video is surpassed by the featured live surgery advertised in the illustration below. The surgery was done at Tufts-New England Medical Center and interfaced through MedlinePlus.gov.

Health-related content has an unusual built-in quality control. Those enterprises that put that kind of information online have a very strong reason to be accurate: they do not want to be sued. When a teacher or student bases what she teaches or learns on one of the websites listed above, she has every reason to believe that what she is learning is the latest and most verifiable available for the subject. This safeguard against inaccuracy is another reason that online health information can be a bountiful open educational resource.