The configurability of our software has meant we have been able to make rapid changes to our sites even for some of our newest customers.

Last year Health Education England selected the company to create an e-portfolio for Dentists involved on post qualification training programmes across England and Wales. The site is now built and been well received, prior to being used in earnest by trainees from September.

However due to Covid 19 the training programmes of last year’s graduates have been disrupted because of the closure of Dental practices and the programme for the new graduates has had to been altered to reflect the fact that they will also have reduced access to practice.

The Axia Digital team has had to work rapidly both to adapt the existing practice assessments and to provide additional assessments for this year’s student. All this has been achieved on time whilst still retaining all the features of the existing programme, for when full access to practice becomes available.

The development of the e-portfolio for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society also posed a similar challenge. The RPS working in conjunction with Health Education England, had to quickly to adapt their Foundation programme to create a Provisional Foundation Programme which reflects the challenges faced by new Pharmacists, entering a highly demanding working environment.

Working closely with the team at the RPS the portfolio to support the programme was developed in five weeks and has already been soft launched. The team is now moving on to expand the e-portfolio so that it can be used by Pharmacists working at Consultant Practice level.

Alongside this work we have made quick changes to many of the Practice Assessment portfolios we provide to Nursing courses in response to the changing patterns of placements as a result of the demands on hospitals due to Covid 19.

The post Helping Our Customers Meet Challenges Posed by COVID-19 appeared first on Axia Digital.

Axia Digital, like most companies, has been following government advice in relation to the uncertainty regarding the CORONAVIRUS / COVID-19.  We have been planning for several weeks, following the new advice last night from the Prime Minister, we have decided to move our team from working in our office environment to working from home.  This was put into effect this morning and hopefully, you will have found that if you have contacted us, it has been business as normal.

Our business continuity plan has been implemented which allows the business to continue in times such as these and has the full support of the company’s board.  The team have all been working as they normally do, only remotely.  We have a series of tools and processes that we use to manage our work and these are either virtual or easily virtualised.  Our aim is to maintain the levels of customer service we normally provide and aim to exceed it if we can.

Our suppliers are implementing similar plans and are keeping us up-to-date with their plans as they are implemented.  We do not anticipate any unplanned interruptions in the services we provide and we will continue to work on support issues and any development you have asked us to undertake or are in the process of asking us to undertake.

Simply put we expect business as usual.

While the news and information surrounding the COVID-19 coronavirus continue to evolve, we are working diligently to stay informed and take all the necessary safeguards to ensure the health and safety of our employees, partners and customers.  As such, we are following the guidance of government authorities and world health professionals in ensuring our decisions are in line with their recommendations and that we are minimising any risk to our team.  We have suspended all non-essential business travel with immediate effect.

Initially, our phones will divert to an answer machine with messages being sent to the team immediately.  We will respond to voice calls as soon as possible.  Please continue to contact us in the normal ways that you have done previously.

Please continue to send support to support@axiainteractive.net

We hope that all our customers remain safe and look forward to working with you over the coming weeks.

Kind regards
Richard and Chris

The post Axia Digital and Covid-19 appeared first on Axia Digital.

As the primary guilty party for this, I have been the one clearing out the company papers. It has reminded me of all the work we have done. It’s easy to forget some of it. Not because it was work we would rather not be associated with, there is very little of that, more because we have moved on. What though jumps out is how those ‘long forgotten’ projects have added to our collective corporate intelligence, that we continue to offer to all our present projects.

In our early days, we developed not only online guidance tools to help adults with their career choices but numerous other online diagnostic and planning tools. Dealing with the new challenge of customising these online assessments for specific regions of Italy, prompted us to develop the ability to easily customise content for specific groups. Our work with numerous training providers delivering NVQs and now apprenticeships, helped us to understand and develop complex hierarchies of roles for the assessment of skills. Assisting an area-based organisation to track the impact of guidance interviews, taught us how to manage data across multiple and different databases.

There are several attempts to produce strategy papers to describe our offer although it is also apparent that various new markets are opened by unexpected opportunities. Developing a site for nurse prescribers at a University, ultimately led to our supporting the practice assessment of all students on health-based courses. Through it all through our commitment to understanding our customer’s needs and creating sites that meet their requirements is apparent.

We can only do what we have done because of our technology and the bank transfers to colleagues in Canada, serve as a reminder that the Axia in our company name, derives from our previous owner Axia NetMedia corporation who were responsible for the operation of the Alberta SuperNet. Still having colleagues in Canada and the UK who are used to managing big data has supported our work on sites with big data sets; we now have one with over 800k users.

Today, I am on my way to a discussion about the equivalence route for the Academy for Advance Practice. The technology piece is almost complete. However, the core part of the discussion will be about records of evidence, how much? how do we evidence validity? It will echo the one I had last week with nurses at the Simon community in Dublin, which was about what and how do I capture my professional development in an environment full of new and daily challenges, many of which require new development and learning.

Different contexts but essentially the same sort of discussion we have been involved in throughout our history. The solution as always is a combination of the application of sound principles of assessment and making the best use of technology, to provide an intuitive as possible pathway through that assessment journey.

At the meeting, I will be endeavouring to contribute our technology and our collective experience and knowledge developed over 20 years.

The post Reflections on Our History: Not Just a Technology Company appeared first on Axia Digital.

Over a number of years the company has become well known by the team at the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery. The company supplies their online e-portfolio, which is being used by those who attend the Faculty’s courses and those who decide to become a Fellow of the Faculty. All applications are now managed online following a successful pilot last year.

Chris Peat, Customer Services Director commented after the Board meeting that: ‘At a time of uncertainty in the UK about future trading with Europe, the company wanted to make a strong statement about our commitment to all our present and future customers in Ireland. Creating Axia Digital (Ireland) is a major part of our strategic plan for the company and we look forward to expanding our work in Ireland and beyond.’

His comments were echoed by the Faculty’s Director Professor Thomas Kearns, who is now a non-executive director of Axia Digital (Ireland): ‘The company has been an active supporter of the Faculty over the years through regular attendance and sponsorship of our conference and by presenting at our seminar programme. They offer the Faculty and other organisations in Ireland not only a high quality technical platform, but also detailed knowledge and experience of how it can be used, to support the professional development of health professionals and thereby improve patient care.’

The post Axia Digital Ireland launched appeared first on Axia Digital.

The conference is the first one to take place since the launch of the new Nursing standards and there are several presentations highlighting the work of the pan area groups, which are now developing regional practice assessment documents across the country.

Creating pan area assessment documents based on the pan London document now appears to be a given. Indeed, there is momentum to create a national document. Several partnerships are also planning to have a digital version of the new assessment document(s) when they are finalised.

The session on ‘Partnership Working’ at the conference demonstrated how much progress had been made with pan area projects. It is a major step forward that nurse practitioner and academics are taking control of the process of introducing the new standards rather than having the process dictated to them.

It also highlighted some of the opportunities that would be presented by having a comprehensive data set of assessment practice, that would be easier to access and review because it was online. There was a commitment at the workshop to not only replicate the paper document but to explore innovative approaches to assessment.

Some of the challenges were also acknowledged. Various presenters made a plea to ensure that there was a consistency with respect to the roles of those involved in assessment. In our experience this is particularly necessary for academic staff, who are often caught between the demands on them from their host Universities and their students/mentors. Digital assessment potentially provides an answer because it does reduce the time checking portfolios, as well as enabling those portfolios to be accessed throughout the year. However, those benefits are only delivered if there is clarity about the role of what is to be called the academic advisor.

Chris Peat our Customer Services Director who is attending the conference comments,

‘It is great to hear how partnerships are being established across the UK. We welcome these developments and we are here to let Universities know that we can support whatever approach to digital assessment that they decide to adopt, whether it be as individual university, as part of an area-based pan assessment group or a mixture of both.’

The post Partnership Working at The NET Conference 2018 appeared first on Axia Digital.

The Universities we have worked with for more than five years deserve great credit for this development. They took the bold step of converting their paper assessment documents to electronic ones and as a result transformed the way Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professional skills have been assessed. All the evidence is that not only are there significant savings in time and resources but the quality of the assessment is improved.

For our part we have demonstrated that our core technology has always proved itself fit for purpose and we have never had to fundamentally change it however that does not mean we have stood still. Each site we have developed has contained new functionality. For our latest site at Oxford Brookes University we have made all functionality accessible with one click and we have added the ability for tutors to add simulated hours to multiple student records with one action.

We are already talking with individual Universities and pan area groups about innovative ways of assessing the new standards and we look forward to continuing those discussions at the NET conference which we will again be attending.

The post New Standards – New Opportunities appeared first on Axia Digital.

BePAD is the site we have recently developed with Oxford Brookes University and it is being used to assess the practice of Nurses and Paramedics. Oxford Brookes University make use of their advanced simulated learning laboratories, to sign off some of the skills that student nurses need to demonstrate, often in advance of starting in a practice setting.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council have confirmed in their report on the new standards of proficiency for registered nurses and standards for education and training that their ‘approach recognises the growing role and importance of simulated learning, providing AEIs with flexibility in determining how simulation is used for learning and assessment.’

On most occasions simulated learning is delivered to groups of students. This new functionality enables a tutor working with each group, to push details of the simulation based learning including the number of hours, into the portfolio of each student who attended the session with one click, thereby reducing the time spent going into each individual portfolio.

To view the site go to https://bepad.org.uk and look at the ‘How-to use the BePAD Guides at the bottom of the page.

The post Capturing Simulated Learning in Universities appeared first on Axia Digital.

Earlier this year, Axia launched the new Professional Experience Tool developed for the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). Now that the first quarter of use is complete, it’s a good moment to reflect on the successful implementation, as well as the scale of what’s been achieved.

Supporting 600,000 Trainees Worldwide

The tool, developed by Axia Digital in close collaboration with ACCA, supports over 600,000 trainee accountants around the world as they record their professional experience alongside their exam progress. As one of the largest international accountancy bodies, ACCA required a system that was not only intuitive and robust, but capable of handling enormous volumes of concurrent users and data submissions.

Given the reach and importance of the system, the rollout was preceded by rigorous performance and security testing. Built on our custom-developed NOW.net platform, the tool passed all tests with flying colours and went live in February without issue. Since then, it has delivered consistently high performance in terms of both uptime and speed, even under heavy global use.

One of the Largest Online Assessment Projects of Its Kind

This project represents one of the largest implementations of fully online, large-scale e-assessment of professional skills by a single organisation anywhere in the world. It demonstrates not only the flexibility and strength of the systems we build, but also the impact that thoughtful, tailored digital solutions can have at scale.

For ACCA, the Professional Experience Tool plays a critical role in ensuring that future accountants don’t just pass exams, but demonstrate real-world competencies alongside them. And for Axia, it stands as a prime example of how we work closely with our customers to design and deliver solutions that meet both educational and operational goals.

If your organisation is looking to modernise or scale its approach to assessment and professional development, contact us today. The right system makes all the difference.

The post ACCA PER Log Successfully Implemented appeared first on Axia Digital.