JISC

Along with the now-200 institutions registered to use Jorum (see last week’s news item), an increasing number are now also contributing resources to the national online repository for learning materials, thereby allowing others to re-use and adapt them.

St George’s University of London is one institution doing so through the JISC-funded REHASH project. Its Key Topic collection is a set of online learning materials covering over 300 topics and all disciplines that underpin medicine and healthcare courses at levels HE1 and HE2 (anatomy, physiology, radiology, biochemistry and others). Developed in-house and in collaboration with subject specialists, each Key Topic consists of a combination of text and visual media, including images, photographs, diagrams, animations or videos.

The project is creating reusable learning resources as a means of supporting student progression from further to higher education in medicine and healthcare. Raj Habib is a learning technologist at the project. He says that having a national repository to deposit the project’s healthcare learning objects allows them to disseminate valuable resources to the wider educational community.

‘We can just upload and then point ILT practitioners and teachers to Jorum and not have to worry about access and compatibility issues,’ he says. ‘As a frequent contributor to Jorum,’ he continues, ‘ease of use is a big issue. Jorum has an intuitive interface when uploading resources and in particular adding metadata.’

The Key Topic resources join over 1,000 resources in a wide range of subject areas already contained in Jorum, and says, Raj Habib, there are more to come. ‘REHASH has submitted approximately 30 high-quality media-rich learning objects with another 30 or so due to go in,’ he says. ‘With other projects and institutions contributing assets and resources the usefulness and uptake of the repository will increase therefore proving to be a better resource for all.’

Further information

REHASH
Jorum