Case Study: Project Tulip achieves open, shareable medical education resources with SURF

Making medicine education build on each other's educational resources

The customer, Project Tulip, an initiative for collaborative medical education, faced a challenge common to educators: they often lacked access to the source files of learning materials, preventing them from being adapted or built upon. This forced lecturers to either use materials as-is or spend considerable time recreating them from scratch. They collaborated with vendor SURF to address this.

SURF supported the development of the SOLGEN project, an open community where educational materials are shared under a Creative Commons license. This solution allows educators to legally download, adapt, and build upon each other's work, significantly reducing development time. While lecturer cooperation is still accelerating, the results show the open resources are already widely used and appreciated by students not only in the Netherlands but also internationally in countries like Mexico and India. SURF's involvement helped create a foundation for future global collaboration and innovation in medical education.

Project Tulip

Stijn Bos

Medical Lecturer