The Health Education England e-Learning for Healthcare (HEE e-LfH) Hub is a bespoke learning management system that has successfully delivered e-learning content to hundreds of thousands of users across the NHS, social care sector and beyond.
The e-LfH Hub is developed and maintained by e-LfH’s technical team, who are part of HEE’s Technology Enhanced Learning programme. We carefully consider requests for new or enhanced functionality weighing up the anticipated benefits to learners versus the costs and complexity of developing any enhancement.
Given constraints on resources, it is vital that we only carry forward those developments that deliver improvements to our core service of providing e-learning to educate and train the health and social care workforce.
Once an enhancement request is approved, it is placed on the development backlog and prioritised. Not all requests are user-facing (i.e. visible to the users of the system). Some requests support the administration of the system, while others deliver performance improvements. So, when we prioritise what work to take forward, we try to ensure there is a good mixture of user-facing, administration and performance improvements in each development release.
Alongside improvements to the system, our team is also busy responding to bugs and issues raised by users of the Hub and fixes for these are also included in each new release.
As the technical team prepares to begin the development work for the Learning Solution, the e-LfH Hub backlog has been gradually closed down. The last planned release specific to the e-LfH Hub was in February 2019 and included 11 bug fixes, nine user facing improvements and eight administration improvements.
There are two areas of work that will be applied to the e-LfH Hub, as they will also bring benefits to the Learning Solution. The first is user registration. We have an extremely diverse user base and it is a challenge for us to devise a registration process that caters for all the differences in those users while also trying to identify common attributes to allow us to provide meaningful reports. We have heard from users and stakeholders that the current process doesn’t always cater for all users, so it is important that we streamline and improve that process.
The other area is the implementation of forums, which will allow us to gather important user research on how users and stakeholders will use these collaborative elements. This will help shape the community aspects of the Learning Solution.
So, while there is still some work being done on the e-LfH Hub, it is being done with an eye on the Learning Solution. The team of developers are looking forward to building this system, guided by user needs and taking advantage of the latest technologies to deliver something fantastic.
For more information about the Learning Solution visit www.hee.nhs.uk/tel and follow us on Twitter: @HEE_TEL.