What are the benefits of sharing my resources with Jorum?

Jorum is the UK’s national repository for Open Educational Resources (OER), and provides free, secure access to thousands of resources which have been created and shared by the UK Further and Higher Education community.

There are several advantages to sharing resources specifically via Jorum:

• Whilst there are many sharing tools available which enable resources to be discovered and downloaded openly (such as Flickr, YouTube and SlideShare), Jorum provides a trusted source of designated learning and teaching resources that are suitable for use in any post-16 educational environment, all from one place.

• Jorum acts as a showcase for UK learning and teaching resources, and can play an important role in publicising and increasing the visibility of resources, and enabling them to be found. Resources in Jorum often rank highly in the results of Google searches, because Jorum is better optimised for search engines to find its resources. This increases the exposure of resources shared via Jorum, and can lead to wider dissemination and recognition. This can be useful for demonstrating professional impact to your community.

• Attaching information to describe your resource (metadata) is straightforward, and helps you to expose your resources to Google.

• Deposit of resources into the Jorum repository itself can provide the security of being hosted and maintained by a national repository service, and remove the need for an individual or institution to host and store the resources themselves. Jorum is hosted and developed by Mimas, based at the University of Manchester. Jorum aims to provide continuity of access to the learning and teaching resources which it contains.

• By depositing resources in Jorum, this national collection is enriched and expanded, making it more attractive to other users, and encouraging them to share in turn.