Jorum Overview
Jorum is a JISC-funded collaborative venture in UK Higher and Further Education (HE and FE) to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing, and standing as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials.
The Jorum Contributor service is open to any institution or project team that wants to share their learning and teaching materials with colleagues in the UK. Jorum will host materials that have been publicly funded and also materials that have been developed within institutions.
The Jorum User service, which launched in January 2006, provides access to the shared repository of resources. Teaching and support staff in institutions that take this service will be able to find, preview, download, reuse and repurpose materials for use with learners in their institution. They will also find a collection of teaching support, staff development and case study materials to assist them in using the learning materials with students.
A research and development strand will run in parallel with the Jorum service in order to ensure that Jorum keeps up with the evolving repositories landscape and expanding user requirements.
Download 'Jorum Overview' factsheet: PDF(57KB)
What is Jorum?
The Jorum repository offers a searchable online library of learning and teaching resources for use by academic and support staff in the UK. The system contains information about resources, i.e. "metadata", and in most cases the resources themselves. The resource metadata allows users to search or browse for resources using specific educational classification systems and vocabularies. Jorum uses a repository system called intraLibrary, procured from Intrallect Ltd.
Who is Managing Jorum?
Jorum is an online service-in-development offered by the JISC-supported national data centres, EDINA and MIMAS. The data centres offer 24/7 information servers, security and management of data, and technical operational support, along with registration, user support, helpdesk, training, and documentation services.
How will Jorum be used?
Teaching and support staff in UK Higher/Further Education Institutions can access the Jorum repository free from a computer with web access. Users can then browse and search for resources, preview and export them for use locally within the institution, via their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), Learning Management System (LMS) or intranet.
What is available in Jorum?
Jorum hosts learning and teaching materials of all kinds, ranging from simple one-file assets and links to external resources, to more complex learning objects including content packages. Content will be collated from a number of sources, including publicly funded projects and individual institutions.
Resources will depend on whatever is contributed to the repository by the community, but will broadly include:
Learning Resources
Resources that teaching staff can use with learners, in blended learning, classroom or online learning activities. Examples include single assets (documents, images, video clips, diagrams) or more comprehensive learning objects (interactive units made up of several elements such as illustrations, articles and assessment exercises).
Teaching Resources
Resources of this type support teaching staff in doing their job. Examples include tutor guides, lesson plans, schemes of work and staff development materials.
Jorum Vision
As a JISC funded 'service in development', Jorum is a component of the JISC Information Environment (IE) and interoperable with other services within it. As such, Jorum will be one component of a distributed network of repositories, and will be free at the point of use for teaching and support staff.
Jorum will provide long-term access to publicly funded project outputs. Jorum will also offer the facility for any institution or project that chooses not to invest in and manage its own repository to store its digital resources in Jorum, as long as it is willing to share with colleagues in FE and HE across the UK.
Jorum aims to promote the sharing, reuse and repurposing of these resources for the long-term. It stands as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials, supporting individuals, teaching teams, collaborative groups and communities in the development and sharing of these resources.
