The Learning Hub is a new digital platform that provides easy access to a wide range of education and training resources for the health and care workforce. Organisations and users can contribute and share resources for those in health and care to access. The Learning Hub was released into public Beta on 29 May 2020, but what does that really mean for the platform and its users?
A Beta phase usually starts when a system is “feature complete” but likely to contain a number of known or unknown issues and many organisations use this approach to digital development, including gov.uk, Apple and Google. Delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) into public Beta meant that the core functionality was delivered in the Learning Hub to enable users to begin searching, accessing, contributing and sharing resources. The MVP enables users to access the system and try it out; providing feedback to help improve it to meet their needs, ensuring that it continues to be built based on user research and with user needs at the heart of it.
The Learning Hub team welcomes all feedback to help improve the service and indeed improvements have already been made in the short time since it was launched. Examples of this include improvements to search results: adjustments to the weighting of results, adding more synonyms and the search operators used. Other improvements that are currently in development include search sort and filter as well as auto suggest of search terms and a specific search feedback form as well as making the date a resource was authored clearer for users to understand. Issues that have been fixed since the platform was launched include special characters appearing correctly in search results, increasing the size of files that can be contributed as well as the length of the filename, enabling weblinks to be contributed that are bookmarked and ensuring accepted file types for subtitles and transcripts can be uploaded.
Since the platform was released there have been four further releases, including adding ratings functionality last week. There will be regular releases into the platform; the aim is to release little and often to ensure that any bugs or issues are fixed, as well as developing exciting new functionality to provide a comprehensive learning experience for users.
Although a huge amount of work has gone into developing the technical infrastructure that the Learning Hub is built on, as well as the functionality that is currently in the platform, this is only the start of the journey. There will soon be an area on the Learning Hub to provide:
- Details of what has been included in each release
- A list of bugs and known issues that exist, along with how these can or will be fixed
- A product roadmap to show what we are working on now and what the plans are for the Learning Hub in the future.
Come and take a look at what the Learning Hub has to offer and provide us with your feedback: https://learninghub.nhs.uk.
For more information about the Learning Hub follow us on Twitter: @HEE_TEL, visit our blog to read about our journey so far or visit: www.hee.nhs.uk/tel.
If you have any questions or require further support, contact the Learning Hub team: enquiries@learninghub.nhs.uk.