When there is talk of the oldest profession, midwifery has a reasonable claim.   The Maternity and Midwifery Forum had built up a new video teaching and revision catalogue of over 1,000 video lectures and research presentations over the first digital decade.  This begged the question – how to make this fantastic resource available to more professionals.

The obvious answer was to make the resource available through universities, hospitals, teaching charities and other institutions where they study.

But we soon discovered that universities and hospitals are not institutions you can simply throw information at for free.

Problem 1: Discovery and trust issues

Lecturers were the first to highlight a problem.  The open catalogue presented too many trust issues when lectures were hosted on open public platforms such as YouTube.

Midwifery is highly contested topic and YouTube is not a trusted space on the issues of childbirth, maternity, motherhood, contraception, or female choices. Many images of women in birth positions or breastfeeding trigger automated content blockers which confuse these with pornographic images.

A carefully curated video lecture, recommended by a tutor, could too often be followed by all kinds of untrustworthy and irrelevant pop ups , driven by algorithms that emphasised culture wars, shock and horror or paid for content.

Students and researchers could be led down a nonsense rabbit hole, clicking unverified material that would never be recommended on a trusted course or by employers.

Problem 2: Distributed content

You can find many lectures online for free if you have the time to find and verify them. Charities host some.  Some lecturers and speakers have copies on their websites.  But that is a lot of extra work for teaching staff.

A new maternity and midwifery video service is born

In 2019, we launched a new video streaming service curated and delivered by maternity experts.  At its core is a suite of box sets (mini lecture series) on key topics for maternity and midwifery. MATFLIX, named after that other well-known streaming service with box sets, includes lectures on a single topic with reference, resource indexes and reflective questions.

Up to five videos make up a box set, accompanied by reading lists for revision or research. These box set compilations add value for teaching and learning staff by saving them time re-inventing material themselves from the catalogue.  What’s more, students and staff looking to develop professionally benefit from a hosted catalogue of trusted material. The box sets and reading lists save time for academic staff.

The video content already had the advantage that it could be viewed on any internet enabled device. Importantly this included the smartphone that is now the personal companion of every student and professional worldwide.

Another advantage was that virtually all the lectures and talks are 15-20 minute long which enables new ways to remix the one-hour lecture.   MATFLIX content was ahead of the game in that it is now well established that learners engage with and respond better to video content.

The costs of cataloguing, posting new content, increased tagging, box set creation, new websites meant that protected access needed to be covered through a revenue stream. So MATFLIX introduced an institutional subscription service.

Access via OpenAthens single sign-on

OpenAthens solved the next problem of how universities and employers could make this rich content easily accessible and free to use for staff and students without sharing everyone’s data.   The trusted and reliable single sign-on service is proving essential for librarian’s seeking to build access to this new kind of dynamic, online video content whilst also protecting data and controlling usage.

Librarians love that the resource was relevant not just to midwifery but to nursing, medicine, professions allied to medicine like physios, women’s health and social historians. And that it was a simple one step login experience for institutional users.

As the MATFLIX service rolls out, lecturers and staff development managers are finding new ways to tag the videos to their courses. We are now getting proposals for new box sets to be recorded from practitioners which could prove a powerful new model for building professional and academic healthcare content into the future.

Get an online presentation and onboarding support for your nursing and midwifery leads.