The Training Platform is at the forefront of all Training Activities. Here we share online digital training materials with Students and Early Stage Researchers, being able to host online Training Sessions and being able to collect feedback. It works as a Living Lab for fostering hands-on activities on OS domains, like working with open and accessible data.
Each partner setups its own node of this platform, where software used locally for online teaching activities and eLearning material sharing will be used. Each node is opened to the other organizations participating in the Erasmus+ project, at least at the level of authentication and authorization (e.g., in order for an ESR from NCI to be able to enroll in an online course prepared by UPB, UPB provides access rights to its local node to the NCI ESR participant). Where needed, and because UPB has most expertise on it, the platform will be built on-top of Moodle, a versatile and mature Open Source platform for eLearning. Each partner has created an instance dedicated to sharing knowledge to other members of the consortium in this Erasmus+ project.
O3/A1. Technical and Functional Specifications and architectural design
A1 starts with an analysis of the requirements for such a distributed (meaning each partner will host it, and still share content within the network and beyond) training platform. The analysis assessed the possibility of developing add-ons on-top of already existing open source software like Moodle (several partners in the projects use Moodle internally for online teaching). Surveys and focus groups have been used to find out what is really needed, from teachers and policy makers and research stakeholders that would be able to profit from this online platform. Following these intense two month, we extracted both technical and non-technical requirements and developed the architectural design of the platform, identifying the missing puzzles developed in-house in this project.
O3/A2. Implementation and first prototype evaluation
Within A2 a first prototype of the online training platform has been developed. This was put to test in the first set of training activities in the project, from where we had collected feedback from both Trainees and Trainers. Such a feedback helped us improve and better offer the training services on top of the platform.
O3/A3. Update and product testing
The platform is tested up-to-the-phase. We took the prototype and transformed it into a working product that able to support high Quality of Service. The prototype is able to host one or two training sessions in parallel with a limited number of online Trainees, while here we introduced scalability up to 50 training sessions in parallel and hundreds of Trainees accessing in the same time the platform. For this, we put the backbone in the Cloud (within the UPB’s and NCI’s Data Centers), with the possibility of synchronisation of curricula and activities between hosts – thus, getting to the ‘distributed’ meaning of our product. In the end of the project, the other partners follow in and install on their premises nodes of the platform, populating it constantly with new and updated curricula, and using the feedback to continuously update the developed software.