Technical background
Through successive JISC grants and technology transfer revenue, the HORUS team has developed a suite of services that can support the quality management of learner centred workplace education. The technology is most fully developed in the form of HORUS-FP, a package that supports the education of young doctors in the novel, national “Foundation Programme”, and has been judged so effective that it has been adopted for use by all foundation trainees in the Northwest since JISC funding ceased. Horus-FP is a web application that runs on MS-IIS. It has been developed in C# and uses the MS SQL Server database. The system is built from the open-source systems described below:
Horus: Portfolio management services
Horus is an open source toolkit that provides services for:
- Gathering different types of evaluation data
- Managing the data in a portfolio
- Linking the portfolio data to hierarchical competencies
- Handling evaluation data as reusable objects that can support a variety of functions
In the Horus-FP system, Horus is used to gather, store, organise, disseminate and analyse assessment, appraisal, attendance, reflective, and teaching quality data. Relevant information is disseminated to trainees, supervisors, teachers, and managers in real-time. Assessment ratings and reflections are linked to competencies defined in the curriculum which enables trainees to demonstrate progression towards the requisite level of competence.
Sweet.Net: Personnel and group management
Sweet.Net is an open source person and group management toolkit that was sponsored by JISC and developed by Jon Rowett at Brockenhurst. It is written in C# .Net and it uses an MS SQL server database. The services are compliant with the IMS Enterprise standard. In the Horus-FP system, Sweet.Net is used to store data about personnel (trainees, assessors, supervisors, teachers) as well as grouping and role information such as tracks, workplaces, teaching institutions, deaneries etc. Appropriate user interface portlets have been developed to allow administrators to manage (add/edit) groups and group memberships.
Osiris: Event management
Osiris is an open source toolkit written in C# .Net that provides services for creating and managing events such as teaching sessions, appraisal or assessment events. Osiris makes use of Sweet.Net’s group management system by attaching Event and Timetable management functionality. Osiris supports 3 kinds of events:
- One off events
- Recurring events (creates a series of one off events)
- Template events (used to build recurring or one off events)
Mondrian/JPivot: Quality assurance
Mondrian and JPivot are two open source projects that have been used to implement OLAP (On-Line Analytic Processing) servers and clients, respectively. They are used to support quality assurance (QA) for hospital and deanery level programme monitoring and analysis. Mondrian and JPivot are developed in Java, run on Tomcat, and can be downloaded from sourceforge.org. In the Horus-FP system, the portfolio data are stored in star schemata, which make it possible to link them to multi-dimensional analysis tools. A key part of the Horus-FP system has been to identify the key QA queries and these have been embedded in the hospital and deanery administration portlets.
