“Jorum is a Jisc funded Service for UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share open educational resources, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Jorum’s free online repository service forms a key part of Jisc’s Learning and Teaching digital content offering. It is the first port of call for thousands of resources, all shared and created by those who teach or have been inspired in the FE and HE and professional skills community.”

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

The Jorum LRMI implementation project began in September 2013 and work is ongoing as the platform develops. Jorum is a DSpace repository containing a wide range of educational resources in many different formats, including a considerable volume of IMS Content Packages. The repository contains approximately 16,000+ resources, most of which are openly licensed. Jorum uses a combination of LOM, DC, LRMI, Jorum metadata, plus custom fields for different collection ‘windows’. LRMI properties are crosswalked to LOM education fields.

Jorum search returns page

Implementing LRMI in Jorum presented something of a challenge to the project team as DSpace only allows metadata to be added to ‘items’ which are collections of individual files.  Metadata can not be applied at the file level, e.g. an html page within a content package, and there is no way to add microdata to an individual page. If Jorum ingests a resource that already includes LRMI it can be cross walked to map to the LOM fields, however if a content package contains multiple pages that are marked up with LRMI it is difficult to extract this data as there is nowhere to store it in DSpace.  In addition, in order to enable a search engine to access a full set of LRMI metadata it is necessary to generate a page containing the LRMI which the search engine can hit. The default page generated by DSpace only includes title, author and description. To generate a page with a richer set of metadata it is necessary to create a custom theme, which is a non trivial task.

Jorum resource page

Despite the technical difficulty of implementing LRMI in DSpace, the Jorum project has made good progress and the team have plans for further development in this area including implementing the new Schema.org License property, implementing the alignmentObject and aligning it to the UK higher education Joint Academic Subject Coding Scheme.  The project team also plan to build a Google Custom Search engine to demonstrate how Jorum LRMI metadata can be surfaced.

Jorum has implemented the following LRMI properties and types, though this is dependent on what metadata has been supplied for each resource.

• educationalAlignment: plan to implement in the future
• educationalUse: yes,
• timeRequired: yes
• typicalAgeRange: no
• interactivityType: yes
• learningResourceType: yes
• useRightsUrl: no, but plan to implement License property

The Jorum project team have not yet shared their LRMI metadata with the Learning Registry as they are waiting to upgrade their platform to DSpace 4.0 before taking this implementation forward as DSpace 4.0 includes an upgraded OAI PMH interface providing a good flexible way to generate metadata from different schema.  It should be noted that Jorum have already undertaken a successful Learning Registry implementation project, the Jisc funded JLeRN Experiment ( which successfully built a Learning Registry node in the UK and developed a number of prototype services for LR ingest and querying. The same developer responsible for the JLeRN implementation has been commissioned to undertake the Jorum LRMI implementation and this work will be taken forward once the upgrade to DSpace 4.0 is complete.

Links

Jorum
Jorum Case Study Questionnaire
Jorum Blog: Implementing the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) in Jorum

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GCU Library encourages all staff and student to create and publish OERs and the guidelines strongly suggest that the use and creation of OERs should be the default position of all schools, departments and services.

“Unless stated to the contrary, it is assumed that use, creation and publication of single units or small collections will be allowed. Where use, creation and publication are to be restricted, Schools, Departments and Services are encouraged to identify and communicate a rationale for restriction.”

The guidelines recommend that OERs should be licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) and make it clear that it is the responsibility of individual staff and students to ensure they have the rights to publish their resources. GCU should be identified as the licensor and copyright holder and staff are encouraged to assert their moral rights to be properly acknowledged as the author of the resources.

The guideliens also recommend that GCU resources should be deposited in Jorum, and that audio or video based OER teaching resources should be deposited in the university’s multimedia repository, GCUStore.

Following Marion’s post to oer-discs I asked list members if they knew of any other Scottish F/HE institutions that were developing similar policies or guidelines. Jackie Graham of the Scottish College Development Network replied that they are also in the process of developing

“…a policy statement for the organisation, and a set of guidelines for staff on the use and sharing of OER. This work is being undertaken as part of the Re:Source initiative which aims to encourage and facilitate the greater open sharing of resources across the college sector in Scotland.”

Re:Source is a Jorum-powered window onto the Scottish FE community’s open content which launched in November 2012. The service uses the existing Jorum digital infrastructure, together with customised branding and interface, to providing access to a rich collection of content from Scotland’s Colleges.

It’s hugely encouraging to see Scottish universities and colleges taking steps to formulate coherent institutional OER guidelines and it’s even more encouraging that these guidelines acknowledge the beneficial role that institutional libraries and the Jorum national repository can play in supporting the creation, use and dissemination of open educational resources within institutions and across the sector.

In light of the forthcoming Open Scotland event that Cetis are running togther with SQA, Jisc RSC Scotland and ALT Scotland SIG, I’d be very interested to hear if any other Scottish colleges or universities are in the process of developing similar guidelines or policies for the creation or use of open educational resources, or the adoption of open educational practices more widely, so if anyone knows of any more examples I’d be very grateful if you could let me know.

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[These posts should be regarded as drafts for comment until I remove this note]

Dissemination protocols

Dissemination protocols in use in the UKOER 2 programme

The chosen dissemination protocols are usually already built in the platforms in use by projects; adding or customising an RSS feed is possible but often intricate and adding an OAI-PMH feed is likely to require substantial technical development. DelOREs investigated existing OAI-PMH plugins for WordPress they could use but didn’t find anything usable within their project.

As will be discussed in more detail when considering Strand C – RSS is not only the most supported dissemination protocol, from the programme’s evidence, it is also the most used in building specialist discovery services for learning and teaching materials. The demand for an OAI-PMH interface for learning resources remains unknown. [debate!]

Jorum representation

Methods of uploading to Jorum chosen in UKOER 2 programme

• The statistics on Jorum upload method are denoted expressions of intent – projects and Jorum are still working through these options.
• Currently RSS upload to Jorum (along with all other forms of bulk upload) is set up to create a metadata record not deposit content.
• Three of the uploaders using RSS are using the edshare/eprints platform (this platform was successfully configured to deposit metadata in bulk  via RSS into Jorum in UKOER phase 1).
• Jorum uses RSS ingest as a one-time process – as I understand it it does not revisit the feed for changes or updates [TBC]
• As far as I know PORSCHE are the only project who have an arranged OAI-PMH based harvest (experimental for Jorum upload under investigation as part of an independent project – [thanks to Nick Shepherd for the update on this HEFCE-funded work: see comments and more information is available on the ACErep blog)]

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