The Learning Hub was released into public Beta on 29 May 2020, which means the core functionality was delivered to enable users to begin searching, accessing, contributing and sharing resources. This was just the start of the journey. There are many features and additional functionality still to be delivered, which will be released in line with the product roadmap.
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 team has recently conducted user research sessions on
catalogues; enabling organisations to have their own area on the Learning Hub as a place for resources to be made available under an organisation’s own identity. User research has also taken place to inform how users want to browse the wide range of resources available across the platform. The feedback received from these sessions is being used to ensure the platform continues to be developed in line with user needs.
As well as catalogues and browse, the Learning Hub team is currently designing and developing:
- Enhancements to search including sort and filter as well as auto suggest of search terms
- An e-learning player that records a user’s answers and interactions
- A migration tool that can automatically migrate a number of resources from another platform to the Learning Hub
- The functionality to increase the size of a file that is uploaded to 2GB
- An area that details the new features and functionality included in each release
- Bug fixes that need to be applied following user feedback of the Beta service.
Since the platform was released there have already been six further releases which include:
- Improvements to search results
- Adjustments to the weighting of results, adding more synonyms and the search operators used
- Ratings functionality
- Identification and warning that a resource may contain sensitive content
- A specific search feedback form
- Clarification of the date a resource was authored.
There will be regular releases into the platform; the aim is to release little and often to ensure that any bugs are fixed, as well as developing exciting new functionality to provide a comprehensive learning experience for users.
Case study: contributing organisation
Kirsty Edwards, Art Therapy Projects Coordinator at Teapot Trust, said: “This is a great way to provide support to hospitals until we can physically be there. The Learning Hub widens our reach as we can send resources to clinicians directly.
The Teapot Trust, a mental health charity that provides support for children and families coping with chronic conditions by delivering art therapy, had been wanting to provide a similar service for a while – causing less intensive work and using fewer resources but enabling them to cover a wider geographical area – but COVID-19 brought it to the fore and the Learning Hub was ideal.
Kirsty said: “We’ve already had a positive reaction to the online resources such as the videos and activity sheets and good feedback from art therapists.
“I’m excited about the relationship aspect of the Hub as we are now easily able to communicate our projects across the NHS and beyond. The statistics aspect of how our resources have been accessed and viewed is also going to be really helpful going forward.”
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 and visit our blog to read about our journey so far.
If you have any questions or require further support, contact the Learning Hub team: enquiries@learninghub.nhs.uk.