Background

Unionlearn provides support and advice on lifelong learning and workforce development across England and plays a key role in meeting the Government's Skills Strategy. Their main focus is on literacy and numeracy skills and also aims to encourage greater employer support for training and strengthen union membership. The ‘Notebook’ project was a partnership between the Department for Education and Skills, unionlearn with the TUC and the Government.

Our brief

Unionlearn wanted to provide an online system to enable Union Learning Representatives (ULRs) to easily track individual Learner’s progress through various courses and activities throughout the UK.

This resulted in the development of the ‘TUC ULR Notebook’ - an online system to allow Learner Reps to store, monitor and track the progress of individual Learners. The tool has been developed to help ULRs collect both the information they need to support potential learners, and the Management Information (MI) that unions and Unionlearn need to evaluate their learning services and demonstrate union effectiveness to funders and policy-makers.

By developing this online tool to replace any other method of data collection, ULRs no longer have to compile and submit reports, whilst unions and Unionlearn can gather detailed, up-to-date information about members (and potential members) being drawn into learning by ULRs.

As part of the system Unionlearn indicated that they required the ability for Learning Reps, who didn’t have access to the Internet to add Learner data onto the system. This would be time-saving for various project workers and other union learning staff, who currently have to process large amounts of information and add it to their own data-collection systems.

Our solution

BOCC developed a secure online system to allow ULRs to gain access to the system and carry out various activities in relation to their Learners.

The new system provides ULRs with a core set of fields to which they can provide specific learner information. They also have the ability to add their own specific custom fields, which they can use to store further data specific to their Learners. Along with this each ULR has the ability to upload files in the form of Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDF files related to specific Learners. ULRs can in addition report on and monitor their progress.

To enable Learner Reps to be able to upload data into the system where they don’t have access to the Internet, an offline data capture method was needed.

This came in the form of ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition). Using third-party software, a paper form was created and distributed to the ULRs. This form can be filled in by hand and scanned into the third-party software at a later date.

Users log in to upload completed scanned forms for processing. Form processing is completed in real time as the user uploads them, so that any errors are immediately reported back to them. The data is then uploaded into the Notebook online system where it can be attributed to specific Learners and assigned to a ULR.

Technologies

The system utilises:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Adobe ColdFusion 8.0
• Microsoft Internet Information Server
• Creative ICR EzData
• SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant
• Hosting on a fully managed dedicated web server at BOCC