Newsline from EDINA
March 2004: Volume 9, Issue 1
If you are interested in re-usable materials for use in learning and teaching, then you may be interested in JORUM, introduced in Newsline 7.2/3.
The JORUM repository service will gather together and provide learning and teaching materials on behalf of UK Further and Higher Education. EDINA and MIMAS are working together to scope, and ultimately provide, the service in a JISC-funded partnership.
The JORUM repository service will host information assets and learning objects for use by teaching staff in their courses. Information assets are individual items such as images, video clips and chunks of text.
Learning objects may include a number of information assets combined with learning objectives and sometimes assessments, to make stand-alone pieces of work that can be incorporated by teaching staff alongside other resources and made available to students in VLEs and other local learning environments.
Each resource can be re-used by other people, reducing the need for lecturers to recreate similar content. Sharing resources in this way can strengthen links in the education community, enhance teaching partnerships and save teachers time.
JORUM will also host teaching support materials, such as case studies and lesson plans, that are to be published by a number of JISC projects and services.
MIMAS are currently leading the work on behalf of JORUM to procure (under EU legislation) a suitable repository system, which will be installed at a data centre by the end of July 2004. The plan is that JORUM will be launched as a service in 2005/6, for use without charge for at least the first three years.
The report of the scoping study has now been published, and is available on the JORUM web site. Please take a look at it and see how you can get involved in the JORUM service. We need your feedback for setting up the service and providing support to teaching staff within your institutions. We will be discussing this at the Join in with JORUM session at EDINA Exchange on 11 May 2004 (see the back page for details). If you would like to know more about JORUM, please contact the project manager, Moira Massey, at moira.massey@ed.ac.uk.