Introduction
For the vision of the Learning Hub to be realised as the platform of choice to find, share, discuss, review and collaborate learning resources across the health and care sector; it is essential that the Learning Hub embeds and supports as many of HEE’s current digital educational services and platforms as possible.
There is already a large pipeline of national and regional platforms, and 28 of those have been identified to become part of the Learning Hub; which includes e-learning sites and web pages linking to resources and toolkits. The migration of these systems and services to the Learning Hub plays a fundamental role in the vision of delivering a platform that is designed by the workforce, for the workforce; creating a consistent approach to education and training.
NHS eLearning repository and eWIN
The initial focus is on migrating two key national platforms – the NHS eLearning Repository and the NHS Workforce Information Network (eWIN). These platforms are widely used and contain broad content that offers access to educational resources. The eLearning Repository is an extensive search and discover platform, which supports the discovery and sharing of e-learning objects and learning resources held within the repository. eWIN was designed to enable improvements in workforce development, efficiency and productivity by providing a central place to share and access valuable workforce information, best practice, case studies and resources.
These two platforms have been selected because eLearning Repository has a similar model of sharing resources to that of the Learning Hub, and eWIN is a contained and defined platform with a valuable pool of resources, which will offer a new angle to the Learning Hub with a different audience.
These two migrations have offered a test bed for the development of a migration tool which will support the future migration of resources from other digital platforms as the Learning Hub team progress through the planned pipeline.
Focused engagement, including extensive readiness and preparedness activities have been completed. Engagement has included working with existing content owners in preparing and ensuring the resources and the accompanying data meets and offers a minimum, viable and quality data set that can be migrated to the Learning Hub, supporting and optimising the search and reach of individual resources.
There have been many rounds of intensive data analysis work, testing and reconnecting with content owners and working with them to cleanse accompanying data and to ensure the resource is ready for migration.
A detailed functionality mapping exercise has been undertaken to ensure features of the current platform are matched or enhanced by the Learning Hub, to maintain consistency for learners. The development of these key features in the Learning Hub has been prioritised and determined the scheduling of the migration.
I continually reflect on the lessons learned from the approach being adopted for these first migrations and use the lessons to inform and refine the process for future migrations, including the development of supporting tools such as metadata and communications templates. The key has been attention to detail: the length of the data fields, formatting, best practice of titles and keywords. Although these might not appear to be important, theywill ensure a smooth and successful migration and achieve quality data to support the search function within the Learning Hub.
Migration tools
The development of the migration tool provides a standard approach to all future migrations, enabling the migration of resources to take place at scale and pace. As part of the readiness activities, the tool helps support the cycles of data cleansing to ensure a good quality data set accompanies each individual resource.
Initial engagement has now commenced with the next priority group of system migrations, which will be regional platforms. The initial engagement phase centres around information gathering through detailed data analysis work, a system feature and requirements mapping exercise and dialogue with platform and content owners and importantly, learners. This is where the lessons learned are really valuable.
Critical pre-requisite system requirements will be mapped to the development pipeline of the Learning Hub and considered in line with business needs and contractual agreements to provide a schedule of migrations.
Benefits of migrations for learners and organisations
The Learning Hub provides the opportunity to showcase resources on a national platform and also plays a part in reducing duplication of learning resources. Migrating existing systems to the Learning Hub will provide a bigger pool of resources to access and browse for the health and care workforce.
We aim to support the sharing and collaboration of information and provide insight into how other organisations approach topics and subjects that could provide useful learning experiences for colleagues.
The migration of existing platforms to the Learning Hub will also enable cost savings and efficiencies to be made by reducing the maintenance costs of multiple platforms.
Use of the Learning Hub is growing and the Learning Hub team is keen for the platform to realise its potential of becoming a go to place for educators and learners to search for a resource on a given topic. We know this will take time, but are keen that colleagues working in health and care see the Learning Hub as their platform and want to be part of the national solution; the success of the Learning Hub is down to colleagues contributing a wide variety of resources to share with colleagues.
If your organisation has a platform you think would benefit from being part of the Learning Hub, please contact the team: enquiries@learninghub.nhs.uk.
For more information about the Learning Hub, including details on how you can contribute resources, follow us on Twitter: @HEE_TEL or visit: the Learning Hub website to read blogs about our journey so far.