The launch of on-course® was followed by the April IMI interim review and the feedback we had from the reviewers was very positive: “The development and launch of the “on-course®” website is a major accomplishment, and adds greatly to the support European biomedical students have in relation to finding appropriate higher scientific Courses and supporting their ongoing CPD”.

After a successful 4 month “settling-in” period a promotional campaign started on June 6th with the creation of a promotional tools box under the management of EMTRAIN WP9. A presentation at ESOF 2012 in Dublin (July 13th) has been accompanied by newsletters, handing out of leaflets at student fairs and drop-in demonstrations. A link to on-course® has recently appeared on the homepage of the Taiwanese EU FP Health National Contact Point showing that news is spreading beyond EU boarders.

Traffic and sustainability

Google Analytics has showed we’ve had over 7000 hits on on-course® but our aim is to get over 100,000 hits by the end of the year. Despite there being over 4 years left on the project we’ve also been investigating long-term sustainability options. We are currently getting a sustainability/traffic document created by Graduate Prospects which will be ready this month and which we will start to act upon this year. We’ve also had discussions with the University of Manchester Business School who have given us the option for Masters students and their supervisors to develop business models for on-course® early next year as part of the students Master course.

Known issues

With the recent launch and relatively early stage of the on-course® development time-line the maintenance and development team are under no illusion that we still have a lot of work to do over the next four years. A few major issues have arisen recently which are currently receiving our full attention. The first of these is the user friendliness of the course provider site and several issues course supervisors/administrators are experiencing when first registering. In response to this we have designed a new course provider homepage and will soon be implementing a list of course provider institutions/companies for the course supervisor to select from during registration. The design of this is now complete and the first part of the work is being undertaken by Graduate Prospects and will be completed next month. The second major issue has been the accumulation of CPDs waiting for approval. This is being tackled from 2 fronts. Firstly, the Manchester WP5 team will now keep track of CPD and Master courses waiting to be approved and approve them within two working days which is what we’ve been successfully doing for the Master courses. Secondly, Claire Johnson’s group are recruiting a new person who will be responsible for non-university approvals and this will ensure courses are approved in a timely manner. WP5 will ensure that backlogs do not occur until the new person is in place. A face-to-face meeting between on-course® administrators will be held this October in Manchester where the successful maintenance of on-course® will be discussed.

Future development (12-18 months)

Planning for phase 3 development has begun and will include:

• The incorporation of EMTRAIN WP8’s Tools and Methodologies database
• An on-line portfolio for course seekers
• Gap Analysis section
• Media section for articles and videos

Point of contact

There has been an enormous amount of work that has gone into on-course® from all IMI Education and Training projects and we are very focused on making on-course® a success. Part of this process is listening to people. If anyone has any comments, concerns or ideas for on-course® then we are more than happy to discuss them or to provide you with updates. In addition, EMTRAIN has a quarterly newsletter that contains lots of information and we have an inside on-course® webpage giving detailed graphs and Google Analytics graphs concerning progress.

In the meantime if anyone has any burning questions then please don’t hesitate to contact Tony Payton, +44 (0)161 2751654, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 If you want to download this status update of on-course®, click here.