Sharing Learning Objects in Health Care Intute: Health and Life Sciences

What is Intute? A free national Internet service guiding users to useful Web resources for education and research Aimed at UK HE students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners Consortium of seven universities, partner institutions and external content providers (e.g. RCN and MIDIRS) Awareness of conference audience of Intute? Remember Biome or Omni?

What do we do at www.intute.ac.uk? Subject specialists identify, index and describe websites that will be of interest to our target audience Catalogue consists of e.g. major publications, practice guidelines, reports, journals, databases, learning materials (including RLOs) Other services e.g. VTS tutorials A brief explanation to what Intute is/does. Intute is a nationally funded service that employs subject specialists to source online resources that are suitable for education and research in their subject areas. The subject specialists write a description of the site they have identified, and the descriptions and other data about the site is gathered in a database. In addition to the database, Intute offers other services such as the Internet tutorials within our Virtual Training suite (approximately 60 over the subject groups)

Evaluating resources Scope/audience Authority and reputation Comparison with similar sites Content Accuracy Currency Format Quality is key. Our fairly lengthy Evaluation Guidelines cover the seven areas listed above. There isn’t the time to go into all these areas in detail, but I will give you a brief overview.

Reviewing existing records Regular and frequent link checks Specific criteria for full reviews of different resource types No catalogue is worthwhile unless the resources included are accessible and their descriptions accurate. To maintain the high quality of the catalogue the link checker is run every week and broken links updated as a matter of urgency. Different resource types are given different review frequency e.g. a government publication is reviewed every 3 years, whereas learning materials are reviewed every year. Sites coming up in our link checker will tend to be reviewed once the resource has been found and the broken link rectified.

Audience Key target: Other users: Students at undergraduate level Academics/lecturers Librarians Other users: Practitioners Researchers Public Students are the key target audience – academics/librarians are intermediaries.

Evidence of use (with caution!) Sample for 1 month in Dec 2008. Plan to sample regularly – twice a year.

Evidence of use

Re-use of Intute Simple links Embedding search box RSS feeds – new resources, news, blog. Creating reading lists – automatically updated. 81% of HEIs Majority of reuse is simple links – but 81% of HEIs have something!

This is what you get if you embed Intute into your own website This is what you get if you embed Intute into your own website. Will look like your own! Everything is updated automatically (by Intute)

Our results on the Sonet site – but looks like their own results!

Future changes More emphasis on student audience (informed by user surveys) Re-design of Intute’s website – look and ease of use Approx half of Internet tutorials re-written – others planned for next year Launch in July 2009

Useful links www.intute.ac.uk Evaluation guidelines - http://www.intute.ac.uk/healthandlifesciences/policy.html Integration - http://www.intute.ac.uk/integration/

Any Questions? Jackie Wickham Loraine Wojciechowicz Jacqueline.wickham@nottingham.ac.uk Loraine Wojciechowicz Loraine.wojciechowciz@nottingham.ac.uk