The changing role of Jorum: sharing using JorumOpen and JorumUK

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly become part of the landscape of learning and teaching resources, Jorum has now opened up for the sharing of resources, created under Creative Commons (CC) licences, through its new collection JorumOpen.

JorumOpen - released today - provides free access to a growing collection of open educational resources, for all to benefit worldwide, via Jorum’s trusted source of designated learning and teaching resources.

This latest collection contains and hosts a range of high quality resources, and we encourage further deposit of open materials, to feature alongside resources such as the entries submitted to the 2009 Jorum Learning and Teaching competition. We will also see further content deposited via the UKOER Programme, which will be tagged as ‘ukoer’.

The new Jorum Deposit Chooser will guide you through a simple step-by-step process to help you determine which Jorum collection is the most suitable for your needs.

Members of UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, using the UK Access Management Federation to authenticate, can deposit - but anyone will be able to search, browse and download the resources deposited into JorumOpen.

All material within JorumOpen will also be exposed to search engines such as Google later this year, further enhancing the search and accessibility of these resources, and providing the perfect platform to showcase your work and learn from the expertise of others.

Alongside the JorumOpen collection, Jorum’s existing collection – JorumUK – will continue. JorumUK contains resources that their creators and owners prefer to share only within the UK Higher and Further Education community. This collection contains all resources deposited in Jorum prior to 2010, under the previous institutional licence: these require an institutional subscription to deposit, search, browse and download resources.

Changes to the JorumUK collection will be made in spring 2010, which will see the introduction of an additional licence – JorumEducationUK. This licence will enable sharing across the UK Further and Higher Education community, without an institutional subscription. Other new features set for release at this time include a unified search - enabling users to search across all resources held within both the JorumOpen and JorumUK collections, providing one simple search.

Summer 2010 will see the introduction of a central deposit tool, allowing depositors to access a single point to contribute resources automatically into either collection.

To keep up-to-date with Jorum developments, you can join our JISCmail list, or look out for announcements on the Jorum website.