Supporting Open Access week - discovering content and its use

[Louise Egan]

It’s that week in the year- Open Access week, where we all come together internationally to support in the sharing of open content across the globe.

Now, here at Jorum we support that ethos all year round, but it is always wonderful to see just how this global event; now in it’s 6th year, brings the importance of sharing content to the fore.

The Jorum team have been working on a number of projects over the last year, to promote and share OER, which has included a number of new initiatives and service updates.

A New Beginning For Jorum

On 5th September, we released a new, updated and refreshed Jorum website. Easy to use search functionality makes discovering content better than ever. Jorum can also provide a new way to view detailed Stats on a resource or set of resources providing a much more tailored view on your/our content. The move to DSpace 1.8, allowed us to provide this greater functionality, and was something that was often requested by our community.

Full details on the updates can be read in our last blog post: A new beginning for Jorum.

LOVE OER

Open access week is all about the surfacing of content, in tandem with sharing resources widely. So, the deliverance of new ways to obtain stats is one way to do this, but we are also working on a couple of projects to help us to understand how OERs are used and shared.

Our recently launched ‘LoveOER’ campaign is seeking individuals who have used, or have simply been inspired by resources from Jorum in their teaching or learning, to share 5 resources that have made a difference to them. We can see how resources are shared, but it is often not always that easy to collect evidence on how OERs are making a difference to teaching within the UK. This new initiative will provide clear exemplars of how to make best use of Jorum’s wealth of content in each subject area and also facilitate and improve discovery of our expanding collections.

Our first curated collection can be seen under Subjects Allied to Medicine.

Further details on this campaign, and how you can earn £75 Amazon vouchers in the process can be found in our blog post:Love OERs? Earn a Reward!

Collecting Further Evidence

Our latest project has been working with Evidence Base to try and find users of OER content, to compile a number of case studies for Jorum. If you would like to be involved, simply complete the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/jorumcasestudies. They will be conducting interviews that should take approximately 30 minutes via telephone or Skype. Please do get involved!

Surfacing Content

Alongside collecting evidence of the use of OER, we continue our work on Jorum Powered - a collection of new ways to help increase the visibility and discoverability of OER and open content, this includes a Jorum Window, Jorum Sub-Site and a Jorum API.

So, go on keep sharing and please do continue to support and share your content via Jorum - the UK’s national repository for finding and sharing open educational resources, created and shared by those who teach in the UK.

We will keep you posted on further developments for 2013/14 via this blog, Twitter, Facebook and though the Jorum update discussion list.