Case Study: Avstar Solutions

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Subject Background

Avstar Solutions provides training to many sectors of the aviation industry including pilots, ground crew, airport personnel and more.

With accreditation from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority they are authorized to provide Dangerous Goods training to both air crew and ground crew which is required to be renewed every two years.

As well as the dangerous goods course, they provide Ground Proximity Warning Systems (GPWS) training, Terrain Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) training and are currently developing new courses including Crew Resource Management (CRM) courses amongst others. All of their courses are delivered through the SKILLBASE™ system.

Business Objectives

To create a system to allow users to easily build courses, including rich media content, with re-usable "building blocks".

The system must be able to build multiple, unrelated courses with structures independent of each other. Historical data must be accessible through the system at all times.

Its public user interface must be simple, intuitive and easily used by computer illiterate people.

System Implementation and Configuration

After significant resource investment, along with continued feedback from Avstar Solutions and our other pilot client, the SKILLBASE™ system was released for use in May 2009.

Configuration of the Avstar Solution’s implementation was completed soon after and their system was made live in July 2009.

Avstar Solution Configuration

Avstar Solutions, in the case of the Dangerous Goods Course, were working to pre-defined course material provided by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). This was divided up into several sections, each with a varying number of sub-sections some of which contained more sub-sections.

As Avstar Solutions were providing this course to both companies and individuals alike, they needed a Payment Step as the first step of the course. This meant when a Student entered the course they would be required to pay the course fee or enter a payment code (if they were from a company that had bought bulk courses).

Once payment had been processed the Student was passed on to the next step, the learning material. This was configured as a Static Form containing sections and subsections matching that of the CASA course material.

Once the learning material had been successfully completed Students sat the examination. This was a Form Step configured to use a dynamic Form which would randomly get a set number of questions and display them across the configured number of pages.

John decided Students should be given a second chance to sit the examination should they fail. This meant he simply configured the Examination Step to include a new exam (Dynamic Form) if the Student failed. This allows students to re-sit the exam without any intervention by John or his staff.

Once the examination was successfully completed, the certificate was generated automatically which

Students can download and print and the Course marked as closed.

While the Course interface was entirely configurable, the administration system needed no such configuration. Companies John dealt with in bulk were entered by himself into the system allowing him to generate branded invoices as well as the Course Keys which they could distribute to their students.

Other configuration requirements such as Audiences (including Branding and access domains), System Configuration Groups (allows administrators to organise configuration such as Questions and Content into groups) and other system set up tasks were also completed.

Outcomes and User Feedback

The Avstar Solutions Online Training System has been running, interruption free, since July 2009. In its first year it has processed well over 1000 courses. This is expected to climb significantly over the coming 12 months as John releases several new courses.

Feedback from users was almost entirely about the course content which John has been fine tuning over time and using the system to make regular updates.

The one interface concern that was raised was the difficulty Students had reviewing the course material (from the learning step) during the exam (which was an open book exam). This was quickly addressed with a configurable option to link directly to the course material from within the exam step.

Overall the client's requirements were met and in many cases expectations were exceeded. From CODEBASE®'s perspective, this has been confirmed by a significant lack of functional requests put forward by the client.