Learning to Share

Jorum Blog

It's All Coming Together - Jorum's 2012 Summer of Enhancements

Posted by Sarah Currier on 30th August 2012

Jorum fans watching closely over the past year or so will have picked up a whisper here, a blog post there, a Tweet somewhere else, hinting at improvements coming. You'll have seen me (Sarah Currier) and Dr Ben Ryan (Jorum's Technical Manager) come into post, and you'll have seen us building a new team of technical and educational experts, alongside Jorum stalwarts like Laura Skilton (nee Shaw), now Jorum Business Development Manager and Jackie Carter, Jorum's Director.

New Jorum is coming Tweet by Nick Sheppard

So far we have been ...

... working since last year on a new, user-friendly interface for Jorum, to sit in front of the standard DSpace interface. Hedtek did the initial development on this (and wrote the blog post...

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17,000 resources in Jorum and climbing!

Posted by on 10th August 2012

This month the total learning and teaching resources in Jorum has shot past the 17,000 mark and is growing week by week!

We have increased the Jorum collections by nearly 2000 resources in the last four months alone thanks to the generosity of OER creators and collection owners here in the UK and around the world, and this trend is set to continue over the coming months.

Our latest acquisitions are typically diverse: we have lots of new resources surrounding the staging of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games thanks to the Oxford Brookes University “2012 Legacies for learning” (Incidentally the Oxford Brookes’ page views went through the roof after they were featured resources in...

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Re:Source - Scotland's Colleges make their content open with Jorum

Posted by Jorum Guest Blogger on 8th August 2012

Joe Wilson is Head of New Ventures at the Scottish Qualifications Authority and writes in a personal capacity.

Overview from Jorum

Guest blogger Joe Wilson has been a stalwart member of the Jorum Steering Group for some time, helping broker the new initiative described below. We are delighted to have him write this blog post for us. It's all about how Jorum is now working with Scotland's Colleges to support their new repository of OERs, as they open up Scottish FE content to the UK and the world. To celebrate this we have put some exciting Scottish OERs, and OERs about Scottish topics, up in our Featured Resources section this week: check the Jorum homepage to see them.

To get a...

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Thirty one years since MTV launched (with Video Killed the Radio Star)

Posted by Jackie Carter on 1st August 2012

Thirty one years ago on 1 August 1981 MTV launched (http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/august1st.html) - their purpose ‘to play music videos’. I’m not intending to draw parallels between MTV and Jorum, other than to say that the need for a service to be clear in what it can and will deliver for its audience is critical. Jorum’s purpose is ‘to share open educational resources’.

Today marks the start of a new year for the Jorum team and the service. After a year of change we’re now ready to move ahead with a reorganised team, and a sharp focus. 2011-12 was about whipping Jorum into shape to be ready to deliver the shared service that is has been developing into. Collectively, with enormous...

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Increasing discoverability - good curry and great resources

Posted by Laura Skilton on 23rd July 2012

Whilst in Bradford for a meeting organised by Prof Peter Hartley (to pull together some of his OER colleagues from across the UK) I discovered a good curry house and some great teaching resources available in Jorum. The curry house started off in the front room of a terrace house and now has restaurants in several Yorkshire towns. The University of Bradford now have resources being used by others because they're made available openly through Jorum. Whilst the example of the curry and the Jorum resources seem very different, it's true to say that each has started in one place (a front room or a classroom) and is now having wider impact. The ORIC resources were "dumped", a term I was...

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