Jorum Update: Open Educational Resources

The role of Jorum as the UK national repository for online learning and teaching materials is changing as part of its support for the Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme[1] managed by JISC[2] and The Higher Education Academy[3].

In advance of the launch of JorumOpen during the 2009/10 academic year, the Jorum Team is providing a mediated deposit service for collections of material that are now ready as open educational resources, both for safe keeping and in order to build open content collections. A special tool using MrCute[4] assists contributors to upload content via the web, submit metadata and select a suitable licence to allow resources to be ‘ready’ for JorumOpen.

A good start has been made with agreement to deposit 24 learning objects and 291 videos from Business and Learning Connections at Aston University. Managers of other collections for early deposit should contact the Jorum Team (see below).

JorumOpen is one of three licensing regimes, with others for those who prefer to share only within the UK or where there is a strict need for licensing by institutions. Present policy is that deposit into Jorum can only be made by members of UK Further and Higher Education Institutions via authentication using the UK Access Management Federation, but anyone will be able to search, browse and download the materials deposited under JorumOpen. Authenticated access will be required only where materials have been deposited with additional licensing restrictions.

Until the switch to JorumOpen users and contributors will continue to use Federated Access Management.

To contact the Jorum Team, send an email to support@jorum.ac.uk or visit the Jorum website: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/.

[1] Further information on this initiative can be found at http://tinyurl.com/oercall
[2] Further information on JISC is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk
[3] Further information on the Academy is available at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk
[4] http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute/