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Further Education Resources for Learning (FERL) is a government-sponsored project to promote on-line resources available to the Further Education community. Over the past few years FERL has gathered information on an extensive number of resources and now wishes to publish these on the web in an easy to use and easy to manage manner.
Moving away from FERL's existing model of static web pages, which require laborious editing by staff skilled in HTML authoring, The Image Workshop has developed a powerful and extensible Microsoft Access database system for the storage of resource information. This is supported by a custom-written information management system allowing all FERL staff easy access for the maintenance of the resource database.
User access to the database is provided via the Internet in a web browser interface. Resources can be searched for in a number of different ways, ensuring that users have a variety of routes to whatever information they are looking for.
The system was released at the end of April, and has been such a success that the British Educational Communications Tevnology Agency (Becta) has engaged The Image Workshop to redevelop the entire FERL web site to use dynamic database technologies. The project will lead to a site that can be easily managed by the FERL administration team, whilst offering users a host of new tools and resources. These resources will be on-line chat areas, user login and registrations tools, and on-line submission tools (allowing users to contribute resources).
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