A guest post from Justin Haylock, Senior Innovation Developer at Jisc.
I had the pleasure of attending, and honour of speaking, at OER16 in Edinburgh earlier this year and found myself in awe of the passion felt by everyone for open education. A few days ago, my colleague David Kernohan showed me the feedback from the recent informal survey that the ALT Open Education Sig and various OER-DISCUSS people carried out into the scope for national OER infrastructure, and I found myself grinning from ear to ear.
My name is Justin, and I’m a senior innovation developer at Jisc and the lead developer on the “Store” project (name to be decided). My team and I have been working hard on a platform of tools and services for the UK, and indeed the world, to enable the effective discovery and delivery of learning materials and resources. What struck me most of all was how closely our solution matches your needs and desires; not simply for something to fill the void that the retirement of Jorum will create, but for something… more. It felt like the perfect time for me to informally share with you some of the features we hope to deliver very soon!
You wanted better discovery; The store works just like any other digital store, with a mixture of OER and paid-for resources, each with clear licensing and cost. We’re working on focused and exploratory ways to find content and you’ll be able to see image and video previews of the resource, and even try it out in most cases before you download it.
You wanted ways to recognise great resources; And we’d love you to tell us which ones are great! You’ll be able to add ratings and reviews to each resource, giving everyone a place to share their experiences and allowing the best ones to emerge on our “top resources” list, featured on the home page.
You wanted ownership and the ability to engage with the owner about a resource; Our curation system will allow resources to have a life after upload. You’ll be able to own your resources, make requests, raise issues and ‘fix’ other resources and you’ll have the tools and data you need to decide how ‘alive’ a resource is, including usage metrics and owner activity information. You’ll even be able to raise issues and make requests about the actual store websites, and we’ll collate those requests and deliver them in new releases so you’ll have influence over the improvements we make.
That sounds like a pretty good fit to me so I can’t wait to get this out to you now! At the moment, we’re focused on migrating the content from Jorum and getting as much out of that in terms of metadata and discoverable content as we can, improving things as we go. If all goes to plan, by the end of August we should be in a pretty good position to deliver the “Jorum Preview” release, just for the UK OER community, before it goes on public release. We want to give you a chance to feedback about what we’ve done with content previously hosted on Jorum so WATCH THIS SPACE and I’ll keep you posted!
