Open HealthStat Edu

As part of the cultural shift toward more open and transparent science, the project is developing an approach to the collaborative maintenance and publication of educational materials in "Applied Statistics for Healthcare Professionals."

Factsheet

Schools involved School of Health Professions
Institute(s) Physiotherapy
Research unit(s) Fussbiomechanik und Technologie
Funding organisation BFH
Duration (planned) 01.01.2026 - 31.12.2026
Head of project Prof. Dr. Patric Eichelberger
Project staff Prof. Dr. Nathanael Lutz
Aglaja Busch
Valentin Deiss
Keywords open educational resources, statistics, health professionals

Situation

The BFH contributes to the shift toward open science and teaching. This commitment is embedded in the Open Science Unit and the Open Science Strategy. As part of open science, the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) fulfills the right to education. Through Switch OER there is an OER repository for Swiss higher‑education institutions, which the BFH has recently joined. The platform promotes both the publication rate and the quality of educational materials. While documents can be uploaded to the repository, they cannot yet be developed collaboratively and openly in the way that open‑source software projects are. The present project will address this gap at the example of “Applied Statistics for Health Professionals”. The project is funded in 2026 as part of the E‑Learning Funding Programme of the Virtual Academy of the BFH.

Course of action

In the context of a CAS project, a conceptual study was carried out in 2025 to develop, maintain and publish teaching and learning content collaboratively. With Open HealthStat Edu, a GitHub‑based demo platform was developed, that showcases possible solutions for various use cases and serves as the foundation for making future courses from the BSc and MSc programmes - as well as applied statistical knowledge for health professions - freely available. The work is divided into three parts: (i) Development of the platform itself – tasks such as hosting, structuring, layout design, and producing tutorials for the two target groups contributors and developers, (ii) creation of a joint script that will act as a guide for statistics teaching in the BSc and MSc programmes (building on existing e‑books from Nathanael Lutz for the MSc programmes and Lukas Stammler for the BSc programmes, (iii) further development and publication of teaching materials (handouts, exercises, learning videos) for the respective courses, in accordance with the script.

Result

Open HealthStat Edu serves several target groups. On one hand individuals, who use the platform’s content as part of their education or further training (consumers). On the other hand teachers involved in statistics education at the Department of Health Professions, who employ the platform and contribute content (contributors). Further, people who want to reuse the source code in their own projects/platforms or who wish to contribute to the development of the Open HealthStat Edu platform (developers). Open HealthStat Edu is not only a content‑sharing platform for the consumers target group. It is also a self‑learning project for the target groups of the contributors and developers, enabling them to acquire the necessary digital skills so that they can actively help operate the platform or reuse its source code in their own projects.