JISC RSC YH Exchange News

The Excellence Gateway provides a free professional networking facility for its registered users. This facility allows you to find people on the Excellence Gateway who have similar interests, or a similar job role, to you so you can network with them to share best practice, ideas and queries. It is a highly intuitive facility and, therefore, easy to use.

The networking facility is particularly useful for people who have specialist roles in education (eg an e-learning advisor at a College). It allows you to find people who share a similar role to you so that you can exchange ideas and best practice.

The facility is also valuable for those who are not confident web users, or those who do not want to expose themselves to others by contacting/messaging them. Such individuals tend to use the networking facility to simply view the personal profiles of people who share similar interests, or the same job role, as them. Viewing people’s profiles opens up a whole host of information to you – not just about the person but also about how the person has been using the Excellence Gateway. Information you gain from viewing someone’s personal profile includes the following:

• What content/pages on the Excellence Gateway they have bookmarked

• What searches the person has conducted on the Excellence Gateway

• What events they have added to the Excellence Gateway Events Calendar

• Resources they have uploaded to the Excellence Gateway “Resources” bank to share with other users

• Which discussion forums they have set-up on the Excellence Gateway

• Which discussion forums they have joined

• Who they have listed in their contacts

All of this information then feeds you with ideas on how you yourself can use the Excellence Gateway – naturally, it points you to content that’s relevant to you, as you would be looking at the profile of someone who has similar interests, or a similar role, to you.

Go to www.excellencegateway.org.uk and click on ‘My EG’ to get started!