Learning & Support

If you are an eligible RCAO, or your primary supervisor is, you’ll be able to start using Personal Resources immediately, and Activity Resources once you've created or joined an Activity.

If you are not an eligible RCAO, you will either need to be added to a preexisting research Activity, or create a new one and wait for the nominated RCAO to approve it. When that approval is secured, you can start adding resources to the Activity.

See more about Research Computing Activity Owners (RCAOs) on the How does the RCP work? page.

You need to create an Activity in the Portal when you are seeking to get access to Activity Resources (these are allocated to a given research activity that you define for us). You do not need to create an Activity when you are seeking to get access to Personal Resources (these are allocated directly to you as a researcher, rather than to any particular research activity).

If you only want to use Personal Resources from the Portal, then you won’t need to create any Activities at all.

But if you want to use any of the Activity Resources from the Portal, then you’ll need to create one or more Activities for them.

• If you essentially just work on one research project, you’ll only need one Activity and all your Activity resources can be added to it.

Example: Lianjie is a graduate researcher in the Department of Structural Engineering, doing a PhD on ways to strengthen steel products. His whole workload is his doctoral research on steel, and he comes to the Portal for a couple of resources to help him in that work. Lianjie just creates one Activity when he first signs up in the Portal, calling it ‘Strengthening Steel,’ and adds the Activity Resources he needs directly to it.

• If you work on different research projects, particularly if they involve working with different collaborators, you’ll need separate Activities for each of the projects and you’ll need to add your respective Activity Resources to the specific Activity that you’ll be using them for.

Example: Maxine is a Biology academic who does her own research in amphibian lifespans, but also runs an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project investigating community perceptions of climate change, funded by the Faculty of Arts. She creates one Activity for resources that she’ll use for her own frog research, and another separate Activity for resources that she’ll instead use for the climate change project. Maxine takes care when requesting new Activity Resources to add them to the right Activity.

Yes. In a single given Activity you can add one of each type of Activity Resource, and in the case of Research Server, you can actually add up to four per Activity. The important thing is that all the resources in a given Activity are being used for the same research project i.e. the project that the Activity was created to represent. If some of the resources will be for a different project, then create another Activity for that project and add them to it.

No, it’s not possible to move resources between Activities. But if you have accidentally added a resource to the wrong Activity, you can always delete it, navigate to the correct Activity and add it again.