JISC

Peter Burnhill

The role of Jorum as the UK national repository for online learning and teaching materials is changing with the introduction of JorumOpen to support sharing of open educational resources (OER) in the UK.

Jorum began as a support activity for a JISC Innovations Programme, a 'keep-safe' for materials after project teams disbanded. Developed jointly by EDINA and Mimas, the two JISC national academic data centres (at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester, respectively), Jorum then launched facilities for online deposit and download during 2005/06 as means for institutions to share their learning and teaching resources. Support for IMS Content Packaging helped 'embedding' as materials could be played in different Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and by February 2009, over 400 institutions had signed Jorum User Licences and about 100 had signed Jorum Depositor Licences. At that stage the Higher Education Funding Councils opted to require prior institutional authorisation.

This presentation will report on how Jorum is being re-shaped to support sharing of content that will be released under the HEFCE OER Programme, under the free-to-the-Web Creative Commons licences. Jorum is also a route to licence and release teaching materials produced by digitisation projects and for materials that use of content licensed by JISC Collections.

 

Andy Lane

I begin with a short overview of open educational resources (OER), their types and characteristics, and how they arise from and relate to different systems of higher education provision such as face to face, distance, formal, informal, blended and online. I will also briefly examine the major goal of OER in opening up or unlocking knowledge, the issues that have arisen from that goal, how it is building on prior initiatives, and the emergent properties of this new paradigm.

After showing some of the characteristics of the OpenLearn initiative at the Open University (OU) I will then explore the changing relationships between different actors in higher education that are evident within open and distance learning as practised by the OU and how OER are influencing those changes. Examples of these changing relationships are the collective teaching processes whereby different people within teams within the OU have different responsibilities for designing, authoring, producing, delivering, supporting and assessing educational experiences; the way in which other, partner, organisations, some educational, some not, are responsible for some of the activities; and the ways in which adult learners wish to access a wide variety of educational experiences - formal, informal, interest led, personal development led, employer led – from a variety of sources across national borders. In effect, what might be the (new) relationships emerging between teachers and learners.

Using evidence gathered from the OpenLearn initiative at the OU I will go on to argue that the openness of OER within an increasingly connected world using the infrastructure of the internet is fostering a growing expectation of greater flexibility in the way that learners can access educational experiences. I will examine the implications of these expectations for higher educational systems and the primary role of Universities within them. Is this mainly a market driven phenomenon where learning is seen mostly as a transactional process that may lead to the greater disaggregation of educational services (advice, teaching, resources, assessment, accreditation, support) or is it mainly a social process whereby new communities of interest and practice are emerging within largely the same institutional structures?