TRUST TAO Portal Enhances User Experience

The TRUST Academy Online (TAO) Portal supports online community outreach for the NSF TRUST Science and Technology Center. TAO reuses the dissemination portal framework that we originally developed for the NSF VaNTH Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies.

Like the VaNTH Portal, TAO provides "courseware profiles" that bundle sets of learning materials with descriptions, metadata, and scaffolding resources. For TAO, we have added a new type of content object, called "project profiles," that tell the stories of TRUST research projects and provide access to resources produced by the projects such as papers, presentations, and posters.

Project designers Laszlo Juracz and Gabor Pap have recently refined this Plone-based framework to provide a fresh "look and feel" featuring visual browsers for content objects along with other usability, content, and interoperability enhancements.

This further evolution of our dissemination technology reflects a continuing commitment to provide educators and other users access to materials and resources produced by our research partners through the World Wide Web.