GuildHE goes Open Source

ULCC provides collaborative research environment to GuildHE's Consortium for Research Excellence, Support & Training (CREST)

With the aim to support research excellence and create a community of cross-institutional collaboration, GuildHE has chosen University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) to provide a virtual research environment.

Sharing research outputs with the wider Higher Education community and the general public is a key aim of the Consortium. "This is particularly timely and important given that the specialised, near-to-market, commercial and community-centred research pursued by CREST's members is vital to local, regional and national regeneration in the post-recession UK" says Dr Alisa Miller, CREST Research Network Coordinator.

At the core of the solution is the leading e-portfolio software, Mahara. Originally designed to support personal portfolios for students it easily adapts to create a collaborative research environment to collect, organise and share information on research projects whilst providing a networking space.

The leading Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle provides a platform for the development of shared training resources for researchers and interactive courses for research staff and Postgraduate researchers.
EPrints supports the institutional repositories for GuildHE & CREST members and also a combined repository providing access to resources across the consortium, linking existing repositories within the consortium and providing a place to store research outputs for members developing their own repositories.

Mick Kahn, Head of Application Services at ULCC says: "We are very excited by this project that draws on our expertise in Open Source platforms for e-learning and repositories. We started using Mahara for student portfolios and it also provides a perfect platform for research collaboration. The VRE will bring together the resources and expertise of all CREST project members and will create a wide range of new opportunities."

 Download as a PDF

For more information please contact:

Frank Steiner, Marketing & PR Executive, University of London Computer Centre

Phone: +44 (0)20 7863 1322