e-Learning Extranet development integrated with existing document management systems.

https://www.tsdesk.co.uk/
Learning account details are required to access this live e-Learning system

		Subject drill down	Course module	Course test administration

The Trading Standards Institute (TSI) is a leading body for Trading Standards professionals with members in every council organisation in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The TSI has had a rolling programme to develop and extend its online service provision. As part of this programme, BOCC had undertaken the following projects:

To complement these information delivery systems, TSI decided to develop an interactive e-Learning system with assistance from the Department of Trade and Industry(2). The aim was to provide workplace learning, refresher information and continuing professional development (CPD) assistance for practitioners and students at all levels in the trading standards profession.

The TSI had developed a detailed specification for the Internet delivery side of the project while work was undertaken to develop the content and course modules. BOCC were approached to tender for this work and were appointed in January 2003.

BOCC created visual design mocks for key pages providing a walk through of the site. Once approved these were developed into web page HTML versions and tested with a very wide range of browsers (versions 3-7), operating systems and methods of access. BOCC ensured that accessibility(3) was a fundamental aspect of the project approach and by having a holistic view of the requirements, design, development and delivery platform, BOCC was able to achieve a high standard of product.

The site is fully integrated with the existing data transfers and updates implemented for TS Interlink in 2002. The e-Learning Extranet content and courses are built around documents contained within TS Interlink allowing updates to the site to be undertaken, verified and published through existing document management mechanisms. By tagging documents with categories and other meta data, it has been possible to paginate course materials and dynamically build glossary links and related links from the database data.

Course and assessment test building, publication, enrolment and management are all undertaken online using the e-Learning Extranet.

The e-Learning Extranet took 4 months to complete, including beta testing. The preparation, collation and publishing of content and course material by TSI was a much larger task and that work is still ongoing so that new courses are being added each month.

The TSI have implemented a flexible e-Learning system that can be extended through additional content provision. Trading Standards students and professionals now have an online resource available at their workplace and elsewhere that is an invaluable professional tool and allows then to interact with other students, course mentors and course tutors.

The service was launched at the TSI Conference & Exhibition 2003, Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

In early 2005, BOCC were commissioned to implement a version of the e-Learning system for The Department of Trade and Industry's Consumer Direct service.

The e-Learning Extranet is hosted on the TSI's dedicated servers at BOCC. The document and property database and supporting files transfers are undertaken using a virtual private network between BOCC and the TSI network.

Source data files are sent as an SQL Anywhere database but Microsoft SQL Server 7 is used for the live site primary databases, utilising full text indexing for document searching.

The servers are monitored 24 x 7 by our own systems staff. The site uses SSL technology(4) to encrypt data passed between the user's web browser and the server for privacy. All user access and data validation activity is undertaken on the server, minimising the requirements for the user's browser and computer and thus making the e-Learning site content and courses available to as wide a cross-section of users as possible.

Pages output to browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(5) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(6) compliant.

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