OER1047a Short Paper (part of Symposium OER1047)

What has Jorum ever done for us?

Laura Shaw & Jackie Carter, Jorum, University of Manchester

Conference Theme: Open educational communities

Abstract: This paper will review how Jorum has provided the infrastructure and support in the sharing of learning and teaching resources. Jorum has grown from a place to share and ‘keepsafe’ learning and teaching resources for the UK further and higher education communities - to embracing open sharing. Jorum’s successes and lessons learned, including overcoming barriers to access and licensing issues will be explored in relation to our community of users. Jorum, a JISC funded national learning and teaching repository was initially born out of the requirement to share JISC project outputs. Today the framework has developed to enable sharing of all content, whether within a ‘walled garden’ - facilitated under JorumUK, or through JorumOpen - embracing Creative Commons licensing for open sharing. Jorum has been a major part of the support infrastructure for UK Open Educational Resources (OER), which includes the JISC/HEA OER pilot programme. This has given Jorum the opportunity to engage with and support the 30 projects from 80 institutions within the programme, along with other OER initiatives. Jorum succeeds through listening to its community of over 7000 users, which has helped shape the service you see today. Evaluation work undertaken by the Jorum team and its community has led to Jorum opening up and engaging with Web2.0, allowing the service to reach the wider audience and encourage the deposit of resources. A number of challenges have arisen through working across all subject areas in post-16 education. Jorum has several approaches to managing this, which will be shown in the ‘Jorum roadmap’, outlining the recommendations and plans being taken forward. The notion that communities form around great content (Powazek, 2002) is the driver for everything Jorum does. This will be supported by evidence collated prior to and after JorumOpen is made available which will provide an initial review of the willingness of the community to share openly. In summary - Jorum has brought together the skills and experience of those who have the desire to create and share learning and teaching resources, and has acted as a catalyst in the way learning material repositories are used today.

Keywords: OER, Jorum, Repository, Support, JISC, Resources, Learning, Teaching, UK, FE, HE, Creative commons, Licences, Deposit, UKOER Programme, Sharing, Open Educational Resources, Contribute, Community, Content

References:
Dempsey, L (2009) Community is the new content, accessible from http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002013.html
Halliday, L (2008) A History of Jorum, the Learning Resource Repository for UK Higher and Further Education (2002—2008), accessible from http://www.jorum.ac.uk/aboutus/history.html
Powazek, D. M. (2002) Design for community: The art of connecting real people in virtual places. Indianapolis: New Riders