The Department of Languages at the Open University was granted £29,000 in funding from JISC to develop the Languages Open Resources Online (LORO) project between April 2009 and June 2010. The LORO repository will allow Open University staff and associate lecturers to store and share language teaching materials both within the university community and publicly through the Language Box. The project aims to create a significant collection of open educational language learning resources.

1. Echoing the current worldwide move towards online sharing of
academic knowledge and resources, the Department of Languages
at the Open University has been exploring the possibility of having a
JISC funding for repository where languages materials and resources could be
stored and shared amongst our own community of language
the OU LORO associate lecturers, and with the wider community beyond.
(Languages Open JISC has just granted the LORO project funding of £29,000 to
Resources Online) develop the repository between 1 April 2009 and 30 June 2010. .
The project will enable us to build on the work of the Faroes team
project at the Universities of Southampton and Portsmouth
(http://languagebox.eprints.org), and the OU will work with the
University of Southampton to create LORO, a languages repository
for the OU Department of Languages.
OU staff, including associate lecturers, will be able to store materials
in the LORO repository for their own use, share it with the rest of
the OU community or with the (inter)national community language
teaching at large (via the Language Box). From a technical point of
view, this means the repository will need to address issues of
interoperability, as the OU LORO repository will have to enable
users to publish their resources with the external community via
the Language Box if they choose to.
Photo from: The project will make available a considerable bank of OU language
http://www.flickr.com/photos/colorblind 1 learning objects and media rich assets, thus furthering the OU’s
commitment to making available high quality teaching and learning
2 April 2009 resources as open educational resources.