www.results.ac.uk

Resource Exchange and Support for Users of Learning Technologies is JISC funded collaborative project between the Centre for Academic Practice at Warwick and the E-Learning Group in Information Systems Department at UMIST.

REsULTs Network project to develop a national learning technology portal draws to a close next month with a final workshop at the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology, one of the project's national partners.

The overall aim has been to assist in integrating the growing array of groups and projects across the HE sector producing information and materials for supporting academic development in the use of ICT in learning and teaching. The project has produced a learning technology portal that demonstrates several online approaches to linking resources to practice through the integration of networking opportunities to discuss teaching approaches, share experiences and exchange materials. There are obvious parallels to designing online support for student learning in the ways in which resources and discussions can be interwoven to produce communities of practice based around particular topics or issues.

RESULTs is a dynamic portal in that it provides multiple views to multiple types of resources for multiple types of users and aspects of practice organised across three closely integrated areas: RESOURCES, MyRESULTs and COMMUNITIES.

As you would expect, the portal offers resource browsing and searching by topic, but also via subject area, resource type and target audience. A managed discussion system is available, which can be used independently or initiated from the point of viewing a specific resource to generate a discussion on that particular topic or resource. Personalised features are offered, such as short listing resources into personal collections and listing of one's own contributions and activities (of value for CPD purposes). The RESULTS Network incorporates personal profiles, a basic version of which is created for each user on registration. These can be edited and developed by the user, thus adding to a directory of profiles and expertise, which constitutes the growing community of practitioners using the RESULTs network.

A number of resources have been commissioned specifically for RESULTs, moderated and classified by expert contributors and provided distinctively under a Guided Tour area. However, an important approach for integrating the majority of resources is that the classification and navigation of resources is user-driven, defined by the community of users: service providers, national support bodies, learning technologists and lecturers in institutions, project teams, and so forth. This is made possible by two main facilities. Firstly, submission and categorisation of resources is defined by the contributor at the point of adding a new resource. Furthermore, the portal provides exceptionally easy-to-use facilities to copy, move and link resources and to create discussions directly from the resource on view.

RESULTs lays the foundations for the ultimate goal of those that advocate developing practice alongside developing resources - that is a high profile national web portal for learning technology in higher education that will be both defined and owned by its user communities. The unique approaches we have adopted are in many ways experimental. Such an experiment provides vital evaluation information to the planning and development of a wider national learning and leaching portal that RESULTs is currently scooping jointly with the JISC and the LTSN. The RESULTs project has delivered - as far as the technology will allow - on what our user participation survey indicated the learning technology community most valued and expected of a portal. Whether staff adopt the RESULTs Network features and facilities as a way of developing and supporting their own practice, contribute significantly to it, or use it, selfishly and simplistically, solely as a way to access each others' resources remains to be seen. Until there is a critical mass of usage of such a portal, it is hard to measure the extent to which we may have been successful in our concepts and approaches.

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