Abstract:

Pool2Business (P2B) an international research project of the Fachhochschule Salzburg GmbH founded by the national agency “Lifelong Learning”, Leonardo Da Vinci, provides an environment to establish, manage and monitor e-Learning courses for certified trainings held by national and international partners/institutions by using highly integrated service methodologies. For the success of this program, quality management and evaluation of all areas are necessary for a high quality and wide acceptance. Therefore it is ensured to have a continual improvement of the training and certification environment as well as the contents of the program. The environment consists of a Learning Material System (LMS) with training, assessment and evaluation procedures controlled by a process, the so-called “Certification Process”. This includes the whole procedure, starting with getting registered as a participant at the P2B training program, the training itself, the module exams during the training, the evaluation of all areas and finally the certification.
For the realization of the certification process Microsoft SharePoint, a Content Management System (CMS), was chosen to implement the whole system divided into different workflows to automate as well as optimize it. SharePoint with the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), a part of the .NET Framework, enables to build own workflows, with own created processes, activities and objectives. With the SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) it is possible to establish an e-learning platform in SharePoint as well. This enables a fully integrated solution of a virtual training platform which is controlled by workflows behind.
Using Moodle as an e-learning platform and connect it to a Microsoft SharePoint server which controls the processes could be another solution. Therefore it is necessary to connect both platforms to exchange data for example with the Plug-in “SharePoint Web Parts for Moodle” of the Microsoft Open Source Community CodePlex.
The setup and the conduct of P2B itself and the usage of the environment can be quite useful for a wide range of training programs with certification character to have an instrument to proof all necessary aspect important to setup and to run a certification.

Keywords:

Pool2Business, Fachhochschule Salzburg, LMS, SharePoint, CMS, e-learning, online assessment.