Virtual Teacher Centre (VTC)

The Virtual Teacher Centre (VTC) is a key online portal for UK educationalists, providing the latest news and events, support information, learning materials, and an education-specific cross-site search engine.

Box UK worked with UK Government agency Becta throughout 2000 to repurpose the original 6000 page static site into a fully dynamic portal driven by an XML Content Management System (CMS).  The Virtual Teacher Centre was the first UK Government sponsored site to use XML for content and presentation.  A metadata standard was developed simultaneously, in line with the Dublin Core and IMS Learning Object Metadata standards, for use within the system.

Content Harvesting

The VTC metadata standard and implementation guide was published publicly, allowing other projects to produce conforming metadata for their sites. 

Box UK and Becta developed a metadata harvesting application that periodically checks for metadata files (in XML/RDF format) on external sites, and collects them into a central database.  This central database (which also includes cached HTML from non-XML sites) can then be searched from the VTC portal, providing an accurate search gateway to participating sites.

Personalisation

The Virtual Teacher Centre has over 20,000 registered users.  Each user can opt-in to a periodic newsletter, which is tailored individually for each user, drawing the latest and most relevant content from the CMS into each email. 

Box UK are currently working with Becta to further improve the benefits for users, including the development of a Central Registration system, based on standards such as SAML and SOAP.  Such a system will provide a single username and password to multiple sites, including the VTC and TRE.

Output Versions

Like its sister site, the Teacher Resource Exchange (TRE), the VTC can output to a number of formats, including HTML, Low graphics (accessible) HTML, Web TV and PDA/Mobile.

Content Management

The Content Management System provides full roles-based access to the content, together with a WYSIWYG editor for content creation, full administration over the metadata vocabularies, user administration, and more.

References: 

VTC   http://vtc.ngfl.gov.uk
Becta   http://www.becta.org.uk 
TRE   http://tre.ngfl.gov.uk
IMS LOM  http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/index.cfm
Dublin Core  http://www.dublincore.org
SAML   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/security/
SOAP   http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/