The evaluation is a joint venture between Lancaster University and the Open University. It's a long-established partnership and we have worked together on evaluations for the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Academy and the Learning and Teaching Support Network.We're pleased that we've been asked to look at the CETLs in Northern Ireland, as well as those in England.

Click here for a summary of what we hope to do and when.

One thing that's worth emphasising, because there's often misunderstanding, is that we are evaluating the CETL programme. We are not ranking individual CETLs. We are trying to appreciate what the CETL system is achieving and, in the process, we shall also find out where the CETL programme is experiencing difficulties or dilemmas.

This is the place where we'll tell you what we plan to do in the evaluation, what we have done and what we're finding out. Most of the materials will be documents but there will be some powerpoint presentations as well -- for example, the presentation we made to HEFCE as part of the tendering process and the presentation at the Learning Partnerships Development Unit on 28 February in which we talked about the importance of building partnerships with local evaluators.

We're asking every Centre to make a mini-portfolio of digital pictures showing its work and to post them on the Flickr evaluation site. [Click here for instructions on joining our private CETL evaluation group on Flickr.] Please recall that we are not evaluating individual Centres but collecting data about the CETL programme as a whole, so this is not a beauty contest.

Pictures should be selected to show the ways in which HEFCE capital funding is being used. Ideally they'll show people -- students, staff, people outwith your university -- using the spaces or equipment that you've got with these capital funds. In some cases, you will already have pictures showing facilities and practices before the injection of capital monies but it doesn't matter if you haven't.

If there are videos or podcasts that you'd like to share, then we'll list them here .

Key informant interviews are almost completed and a summary of findings will be published in our June progress report. By key informants we mean people who have interest and expertise in the CETLs and who can speak with authority about the CETLs in the context of higher education in England and Northern Ireland. If there is someone you think we should speak to as a key informant, please email Peter Knight.

CETLs have been asked by HEFCE to submit self-evaluations in the summer. We will be using them as evaluation material. Click here for suggestions about ways of reporting. Let's be clear, though: you can report in any way that makes good sense to you but we  do ask that you do cover the areas mentioned in the document.