User:Planophore/sandbox

About Jorum
Jorum (meaning a large bowl or vessel for drinking) was the name given to a project commissioned by JISC in 2002. The main purpose of Jorum was to ensure that JISC funded learning and teaching projects were still available after the project end dates, once staff may have moved on or dissemination websites were discontinued. The UK National Data Centres, EDINA (based at the University of Edinburgh) and Mimas (based at the University of Manchester), were chosen to conduct this project.

Early Developments
In February 2002 JISC also made a call for projects that would explore the ‘repurposing’ of existing and future learning materials under the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme. EDINA and Mimas proposed to add a development bay to the Jorum repository and this combined functionality was funded by JISC.

Further expansion
By 2004 JISC decided to fund the set-up and launch of a full Jorum service, available to all Further and Higher Education institutions in the UK. A legal framework for the service was devised which led to an ‘institutional licence’ model – one which allowed organisations to deposit learning materials in Jorum and another to use the existing content. Between November 2005 and August 2008 over 2200 resources had been deposited by approximately 90 institutions, and over 400 institutions had registered to use the service. The original ‘development bay’ had now been replaced by a ‘community bay’ which allowed more interaction between users.

The move to Open Educational Resources (OER)
With the growth of open educational resources under creative commons licenses, in 2009 Jorum made another significant service change through the development and trial of an open source platform for hosting learning and teaching resources. After preliminary trials, the platform was launched as ‘Jorum Open’ in January 2010. In February the Jorum Education UK licence was introduced and by July 2011 the resource collection had grown to more than 12,400 objects. At this point EDINA and Mimas were still jointly responsible for the service. Mimas mainly concentrated on promotion and engagement activities (including the development of the Jorum website) while EDINA focused on the legal and technical support structures, including the development of the open source platform (based on Dspace technology).

Recent developments and a vision for the future
In May 2011, following a competitive bidding process between EDINA and Mimas, Mimas was chosen to wholly manage Jorum and to develop the service into the future. In an environment where open repositories have multiplied across the Internet, Jorum is currently focusing on its core qualities and investing in more technical expertise to underpin and extend the platform technology that has already been developed. Jorum maintains that it can provide a national repository service that offers long term sustainability on a robust technical platform together with highly developed processes for compliance with creative commons copyright standards. Resource aggregation and harvesting with other resource providers is also being continuously developed, making Jorum one of the very few repositories that can integrate learning objects from multiple institutions. However the challenges of operating in an environment where a plethora of resource collections now exist are real and the need for promotion and growth remain a challenge for the future. The growing need to recognise more diverse sections of the post 16 community (including some Adult Community Learning and Work Based Learning providers) may also provide more scope for development in terms of user authentication and the growth of particular subject areas within the collection. With the thousands of learning objects available, some subject areas remain relatively under represented and strategies for ‘leveling’ the collections should also form an interesting challenge.