Hello, Jisc Members. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Pippin and I’m the Graduate Digital Librarian for FE here at Jisc. For the past few months, I’ve been working on Virtual Library.
Virtual Library is a new service that allows you to find all of Jisc’s resources for FE, and can be integrated with your college’s existing Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) via Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). If you aren’t sure if your VLE can use LTI Tools, check with your institution IT Support and they’ll be able to tell you.
By uniting all of our resources into a single tool which can be fully integrated with your college’s existing online platform, we’ve streamlined the experience of getting resources in front of your learners. The Virtual Library includes the full e-books for FE catalogue, and links to all of Jisc’s Vocational learning resources, making it easier than ever for you to find all the resources you need. The resources are organised by subject area, and every e-book and resource comes fully-furnished with descriptions and images, turning both browsing and finding what you need quickly into a visually appealing experience.
Virtual Library will be updated every year to coincide with Jisc’s e-books for FE update, so you can be sure your students are getting access to the most up-to-date resources Jisc has to offer. The updates will be entirely handled by Jisc and will be applied instantaneously so you don’t need to worry about manually updating.
As Virtual Library is built into Moodle, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of Moodle’s tracking abilities, so you’ll be able to get an idea of student usage of the resource. If your college uses Moodle as its VLE, this information will come to you automatically.
Jisc Virtual Library includes:
- The full e-books for FE catalogue, sorted by subject area, updated every year
- Links to Jisc’s Vocational learning resources (LRSs) for Construction, Digital and IT, Education and childcare and Health and social care, which are priced according to Jisc banding (these are currently free for ALL our members until 31st July 2020 to help support learning from home)
- Links to Jisc’s Hairdressing VLR available which is always free for member colleges
- Links to additional resources from Jisc Collections, specially curated to be relevant to FE institutions
- A handy on-board guide for making the most of the Virtual Library
- An area dedicated to GCSE English and Mathematics
Virtual Library is available for free to our members. Subscribe to this free service through Jisc’s Licence subscriptions manager (LSM) today.